Violin Sells PCIe Business to Hynix

Violin Memory has entered into an agreement to sell off their shuddered PCIe flash storage business to SK hynix for roughly $23 million and the assumption of liabilities totaling $.5 million. In late February Violin announced they’d be exiting the PCIe storage business as part of a more broad restructuring. The PCIe business never made sense for Violin anyway, who’s real value-add is in their high performance AFAs, not host-side integrations.

Violin Memory has entered into an agreement to sell off their shuddered PCIe flash storage business to SK hynix for roughly $23 million and the assumption of liabilities totaling $.5 million. In late February Violin announced they’d be exiting the PCIe storage business as part of a more broad restructuring. The PCIe business never made sense for Violin anyway, who’s real value-add is in their high performance AFAs, not host-side integrations.

The sale to SK hynix is particularly interesting though because Violin had partnered with Toshiba prior for the PCIe cards. Toshiba has since acquired OCZ, who offers a few flavors of enterprise PCIe flash storage and must have decided that was sufficient. SK hynix on the other hand is well known for their memory products and NAND that’s integrated into SSDs from other vendors, but that’s about it. This deal signals intentions from SK hynix that they want to press branded products into the enterprise space at a minimum. It remains to be seen what SK hynix does and on what timetable however.

The transaction is scheduled to close by the end of June, subject to closing conditions. SK hynix will extend employment to the members of Violin’s PCIe development team.

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