SanDisk purchases Pliant Technology, in a deal reaching $327m in cash and equity-based incentives.
Pliant is an enterprise-level SAS protocol-based SSD developer. It also sells PCI-e based solutions for high performance servers.
Pliant uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND in enterprise SSDs, and the lower cost of MLC is a key enabler for the broad adoption of SSDs in the enterprise market.
As it increases performance and reduces power consumption, flash memory is making significant inroads into the enterprise. By combining Pliant's enterprise-level system expertise with SanDisk's large-scale MLC memory production, SanDisk wants to carve out a bigger position in the enterprise SSD market."
The enterprise market is a fairly lucrative sector-- one Gartner predicts will reach $4.2Bn by 2015-- and now one SanDisk (better known for its consumer solutions) has another foot in.