SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today extended its enterprise solid state disk drive (SSD) solutions portfolio with the acquisition of FlashSoft, a provider of innovative caching software products. SanDisk intends to sell FlashSoft's products as standalone software, as well as offer these software products in combination with SanDisk's growing portfolio of SAS, PCIe and SATA enterprise solutions.

FlashSoft's software is targeted for Windows, Linux and VMWare platforms, and will form the basis of a growing ecosystem of SSD-optimized software solutions from SanDisk and third party partners, enabling the configuration of complete solutions optimized for the specialized needs of enterprise and cloud customers.

Data center managers face ongoing challenges in achieving balanced application performance as the underlying system resources process data at different rates. As CPU speeds and memory bandwidth have grown rapidly, I/O bottlenecks have begun limiting application performance as data-starved CPUs must wait for overloaded I/O subsystems to deliver application data.

SSD-based caching solutions allow the most frequently accessed data to reside close to the CPU in high-performance flash memory, resulting in dramatic application performance increases. FlashSoft's software solutions enable flash products, such as SanDisk's Lightning Enterprise SSDs and PCIe-based devices, to be configured as high-performance cache for their HDD storage. This allows customers to improve performance with smaller, more cost effective storage configurations and to deploy more virtual machines per server in virtualized environments. SanDisk's strategy for serving enterprise and cloud customers includes offering optimized hardware and software solutions, as well as partnering with leading ISVs and solution providers to enable customers to mix and match devices and software to optimize for specialized application requirements.

"The acquisition of FlashSoft represents an important step in SanDisk's strategy of delivering complete SSD and software solutions to enterprise storage customers," said Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of SanDisk. "FlashSoft's software products complement our growing family of SAS, PCIe and SATA Enterprise SSDs, and we are pleased to welcome FlashSoft to the SanDisk family."

The FlashSoft acquisition is expected to be neutral to SanDisk's earnings in 2012 and accretive in 2013. Additional details of the acquisition were not released.