As 2014 began there was a fairly silent acquisition made by SGI that could prove to be significant in the future. SGI picked up the technology and engineering team of Starboard Storage System.
Full disclosure, I used to work for Starboard and have great respect for the technology they developed. What is important now though is what SGI will do with the technology. I have no direct knowledge and can only speculate on the direction, but before I do that let's take a look at SGI today to see why the Starboard techology interested them.
SGI was of course Silicon Graphics Inc and was founded in 1982. The pioneered alot of graphics clustering and file system technology and produced high performance computer systems. I worked with SGI as a partner back in the late 80's when I was at Compaq Computer and both companies were involved in an Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) which attempted do define a new standard built around MIPS processors, EISA architecture, Windows NT and a merge of SCO and Digital Unix. The ACE initiative finally collapsed as SGI acquired MIPS, DEC released Alpha and Intel substantially improved the performance of their processors.
Silicon Graphics eventually went under due to competition from industry standard computing systems and its assets were acquired by Rackable Systems who then used the SGI name.
Rackable brought servers to the game and SGI brought engineering prowess for the high end in addition to significant IP in file systems and clustering, but neither really had much storage technology. Today SGI's InfiniteStorage and other storage systems consists mostly of OEM platforms from NetApp and DDN along with ZFS based file storage.
SGI is positioned into high performance computing, archiving and big data and while these OEM storage platforms fill a gap they do not command rich margins. Also SGI is the engineering prowess behind the XFS file system, (Which is open source), so it is strange they would be using ZFS. The reason they do this though is that ZFS provides elements like disk pooling and snapshots which they would have to reinvent if they used XFS.
So how does acquiring Starboard Storage help SGI? The following are the key factors.
- Starboard had developed a full hybrid storage platform that exploits SSD and uses sophisticated caching algorithms to enable the development of lower cost but higher performance storage platforms. Indeed Starboard won Best of Show at the Flash Memory Summit in Califormia in 2013. Hybrid Storage is a model that has found success in the market with Nimble (who recently had an IPO), Tintri and Tegile. Starboard technology has some potential advantages because unlike Nimble and Tintri it spans both file and block storage. The Starboard caching algoritms could also me leveraged in the future with the recently acquired assets from FileTek.
- Starboard brings snapshots and dynamic disk pooling technology to SGI. The Starboard capacity free snapshots are nice but the disk pooling technology is potentially key to SGI. With the fixed archiving initiatives thay are looking for large scale data pools. Starboard developed from scratch a disk pooling methodology that can scale to petabytes but with minimal overhead and fast rebuild time. All data protection is also in software so no RAID controller is needed. This in combination with technology SGI got from Copan could enable the development of some very powerful archiving platforms. They technology can also be extended to solid state only systems.
- The Starboard Storage stack is software only. This enables SGI to leverage their own hardware for future platforms and also enables future Software Defined Storage models.
- Starboard's file system of choice was XFS. With SGI understanding of XFS and their developement of Clustered XFS this provides a unique opportunity to expolit IP that was not reaping significant benefits in the market for SGI. The fact that both Starboard and SGI have deep XFS knowledge and that Starboard has implemented an entire storage stack around XFS may be one of the key reasons why SGI acquired the technology. SGI may now be able to monetise their XFS investments.
Only SGI knows what the next steps will be but the Starboard technology offers them a number of interesting options. With the acquisition SGI now has the IP to build a competitive position in both servers and storage for its key markets, and potentially improve both revenue and margin.
I will watch their progress closely.
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