Drive-making kingpin WD gobbles Skyera... to give to HGST

Rumour had it last month that WD was going to buy Skyera and rumour was right. WD subsidiary HGST is getting an early Christmas present with WD buying the all-flash array packing density king and assigning it to HGST. Skyera changed its CEO in August, with COO Frankie Roohparvar taking over from flash tech genius and co- …

[Anonymous Coward]

$400m?

"Terms of the transaction were not disclosed" and "The acquisition brings engineering talent and intellectual property" tells you this was just a talent acquisition by the largest shareholder. They foreclosed. Would be surprised if they product even keeps shipping.

[Kev99]

Flash arrays recoverable?

One question. When a standard alumino-plastic disk goes tits up, the data can often be recovered. When a flash array goes tits up, can anything be recovered? If not, why are they being used? Or are they only being used for active transaction, temporary storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Flash arrays recoverable?

So you'd run with only one copy of your most precious data!?

You know how I can tell you are not a Data Centre Manager!?

[cageordie]

Re: Flash arrays recoverable?

They are ridiculously fast. They have no seek time. They can have huge data rates. Reads tend to be faster than writes. Companies like Violin deal with the reliability issues with layers of RAID and hardware redundancy. Multiple layers and paths. I saw a Violin demo where they offered customers the opportunity to remove any card at random, the box never missed a beat. On card failure they can hot swap another card in, the system then deals with rebuilding the on that fifth of the RAID group.

[Levente Szileszky]

So finally SkyEagle has a chance to land...?

I mean the PR-blitz Skyera was able to generate back when it took off was mostly based on SkyEagle's much-touted, (at the time) sanity-challenging 20GB/s throughput per box, at ~$2/GB price, with 200-300TB capacity...? It was ~2 years ago - what happened to that?

[Chris Mellor 1]

Nowhere near $400 million

Sent to me by a reader and posted anonymously:

Skyera at $400M? Not what I'm hearing on the street. They ran out of money, many leaving, forced to sell. I suspect anything close to $400M would have been material enough to require WD to disclose the actual amount as a public company. Since they were a key investor the amount was quite low.

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I heard it was a low amount from another person too.

Chris.

[cageordie]

Re: Nowhere near $400 million

I was told $9M on top of the $90M they were already in for. Basically a small golden handshake to get rid of the execs. The question is why WD would throw more money down the hole.

[cageordie]

So has anyone seen one working? Is there a third party benchmark?

I interviewed there and so did several of my friends. My service engineer friend asked very directly to see one working. Their 1U box is supposed to have the same capacity as a Violin box and yet they do it in 1U? I just don't see how they'd get the parts in to the box. The Violin box has huge fans and blows like a heater, mostly what is in the box seems to be Flash. So if Skyera has the same sort of capacity and better speed then unless Skyera invented new device physics it must be kicking 1KW out of a 1U box. And it only has a few small, 40mm, fans. At Motorola Wireless we needed a whole load of those 40mm fans to keep a relatively low power processor card cool. I just don't see how they are doing this, and with the absence of 3rd party benchmarks I have to wonder whether they ever really had a product.