Seagate, SK Hynix said to team up for enterprise SSDs
Josephine Lien, Taipei; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES [Tuesday 13 December 2016]
Seagate and SK Hynix will form a joint venture dedicated to developing SSDs for enterprise servers and data centers, according to industry sources.
The joint venture will combine Seagate's expertise in hard disk drives with SK Hynix' complete embedded flash and SSD solutions to create a new player in the enterprise SSD market, which is currently dominated by Samsung and Intel, said the sources.
Western Digital earlier in 2016 completed its acquisition of SanDisk making the pair the first camp consolidating their respective areas of expertise, Western Digital's in HDD and SanDisk in SSD, the sources noted. Seagate and SK Hynix are expected to follow suit by forming a joint venture.
SK Hynix previously acquired California-based Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD), a developer of memory-chip controllers, which has already improved its competitiveness in the SSD field by releasing products equipped with its in-house developed controller chips, the sources identified. SK Hynix plans to have its controller design team consolidated into the new company, while Seagate will transfer part of its technical team to the entity, the sources said.
In other news, Silicon Motion Technology has entered the supply chain of the Alibaba Group by providing the e-commerce company SSD solutions, the sources noted. Silicon Motion previously acquired Shannon Systems, a China-based supplier of enterprise-class PCIe SSD and storage array solutions, which is helping the memory controller device supplier expand its presence in China, the sources said.
digitimes.com |
