Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

EMC Joins the Flash Madness Club by Acquiring Israel’s XtremIO

Storage technology giant EMC said today that it has reached a deal to acquire the Israeli start-up XtremIO. The price was reported by the Israeli newspaper Globes to be $430 million, but EMC didn’t confirm that in a statement. EMC said the all-cash deal won’t have a material effect on its results this year.

XtremIO makes storage arrays based on flash memory chips, and is a would-be rival to Violin Memory, the Silicon Valley start-up that’s revving its engine for an IPO later this year, following an $80 million Series D funding round which AllThingsD reported exclusively last month.

Another player in the all-flash storage array business is Pure Storage, which came out of stealth mode last August with a $30 million Series C led by Redpoint Ventures.

News of the deal gave shares of Fusion-IO a jolt. Fusion-IO rose 50 cents, more than 2 percent, to $21.63, just as the markets opened for trading in New York. As of yesterday’s close, Fusion shares have fallen by more than 6 percent since its IPO debut last June.

Fusion is a founding member of the Flash Madness Club. Its flash memory insert cards for servers are widely used in data centers of companies like Apple, Salesforce.com and Facebook, speeding up the ability of servers to process data by eliminating bottlenecks created by conventional hard drives. Its customers also include Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM among other server manufacturers.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus