Micron Buys U.K. Based Virtensys Ltd. For PCIe SSD Solutions

The PCIe SSD based storage market is getting quite popular these days. Micron already has a PCIe SSD on the market, but their acquisition of U.K. company Virtensys on Friday should help them keep up with other PCIe SSD rivals like Fusion-io and OCZ.

Virtensys Ltd. specializes in PCIe I/O sharing appliances for large server and owns intellectual property to help share I/O resources through PCIe devices. Their products share Ethernet, Fibre channel, and local storage among many servers.

SATA III/SAS SSDs are already bumping into the current ceiling of 6gbps speeds, so solutions which can circumvent the SATA speed limit are attractive for manufacturers of workstation and enterprise class SSDs. PCIe SSDs offer the opportunity to achieve greater speeds, more IOPS, and lower latencies — all of which are important for enterprise and data center applications.

The promise of PCIe SSDs is prompting other big players to make similar purchases. Like Micron, OCZ touts several PCIe solutions of it’s own and also made a similar purchase when it bought Sanrad a few weeks ago.

The most obvious application for Micron’s new purchase would be to add their SSDNow P320H PCIe SSD in the Virtensys appliances, but any intellectual property relating to PCIe based storage could give the owner a substantial advantage in what is already a rapidly expanding part of the growing SSD market.