14 DAY TRIAL // Soon after Hitachi GST was acquired by Western Digital for $4.3 billion, LSI has also announced that its has signed a definitive agreement to sell its external storage system business to NetApp for $480 million in cash.
As EETimes reports, LSI's external storage system business was in charge of developing the Engenio line of products and technology and generated revenues of $705 million in 2010.
LSI's decision to part ways with this business seem to have been motivated by the company's desire to become a pure-play semiconductor company and will help it cut back on operating expenses with $35 million to $40 million per quarter.
“We’re excited by the opportunities we have been pursuing in our semiconductor business and are well positioned at the forefront of a strong pipeline of design win ramps that we expect to drive top line growth.
“Going forward as a pure-play storage and networking semiconductor company, we believe we can accelerate the achievement of our current business model, establish a richer business model target, and deliver greater long-term shareholder value,” said Abhi Talwalkar, LSI president and chief executive officer, in a statement.
The Engenio line included various models of external storage systems, ranging from 2U rack mountable solutions all the way up to the Engenio 7900 series, and was designed to be used in data-intensive, multi-vendor environments.
In addition, the storage systems supported a wide range of host interfaces, including iSCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand.
LSI's Engenio business also included some software solutions, such as the SANtricity and Simplicity storage managers.
The move doesn't affect in any way LSI's RAID adapter business, which develops the LSI MegaRAID and 3ware storage controllers and software for direct-attached storage environments.
After the unit is closed, most of the LSI employees are expected to join NetApp.