Micron Announces Agreement to Acquire Virtensys

Transaction Creates Enterprise Solution Synergies With Virtensys PCIe-Sharing Appliances and Micron PCIe Solid State Drives

BOISE, Idaho, Jan. 20, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:MU), and Virtensys Ltd. today announced that the companies have signed an agreement for Micron to acquire the assets of privately held Virtensys, a provider of PCIe-sharing solutions based in Manchester, England and Beaverton, Ore.

The transaction would further strengthen Micron's enterprise storage portfolio by combining Virtensys' award-winning PCIe virtualization technology with Micron's solid state drives (SSDs), enabling data centers to share local storage across multiple servers.

"Virtensys' PCIe-sharing technology has helped change the way data center operators manage and deploy their virtualized I/O resources, and Micron's enterprise PCIe drive delivers market-leading speed, reliability and power efficiency," said Edward Doller, Micron Vice President and Chief Memory Systems Architect. "This agreement would enable a combination of enterprise technology solutions that have the opportunity to virtualize SSD storage on the path to a more flexible and dynamic data center."

"Virtensys has served as an OEM focused company working to deliver innovative solutions with some of the world's leading server, storage and I/O adapter manufacturers," said John Nicholson, Virtensys Chairman and CEO. "Our technology complements Micron's enterprise products as we strive to empower the virtual data center, and we are delighted to join the Micron family."

The transaction is subject to closing conditions and is currently anticipated to close by the end of the month. Specific terms of the proposed agreement are confidential.

Micron Technology, Inc., is one of the world's leading providers of advanced semiconductor solutions. Through its worldwide operations, Micron manufactures and markets a full range of DRAM, NAND and NOR flash memory, as well as other innovative memory technologies, packaging solutions and semiconductor systems for use in leading-edge computing, consumer, networking, embedded and mobile products. Micron's common stock is traded on the NASDAQ under the MU symbol. To learn more about Micron Technology, Inc., visit www.micron.com.

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MANCHESTER, England and BEAVERTON, Ore. – August 29, 2011 – Virtensys™ Ltd, a provider of PCIe-sharing solutions, today announced a VMware vCenter Server Plugin that allows administrators to manage and provision virtualized I/O resources within VMware vSphere 5. This new release centralizes the control of multiple VIO-4000 series appliances, regardless of model type and number of VIO appliances. Virtensys will demonstrate its PCIe-sharing solution at VMworld in Las Vegas, August 29 through September 1, at booth #1160.

“With this announcement, we are simplifying I/O management for our customers’ VMware vSphere^® environments, as they can now manage their VIO-4000 series appliances within VMware vCenter™ Server,” said Stephen Spellicy, vice president of marketing at Virtensys. “VMware administrators can manage a variety of virtualized I/O resources from a single pane of glass. Virtensys sees VMware vCenter Server as the de facto management platform for the virtual data center; the Plugin has been designed for use with and validated extensively in Virtensys’ labs with both VMware vCenter Server 4 and vCenter Server 5.”

The VMware vCenter Server Plugin for Virtensys provides VMware administrators with the ability to manage their virtualized 10 GbE vNICs, 8 Gbps FC vHBAs, and their virtualized SSDs (vSSDs). I/O provisioning has never been easier, because it is completely centralized, the I/O profile of a server can be assigned/re-assigned on the fly, and the physical I/O adapter is no longer statically bound to a server, providing new freedom to the dynamic, virtualized data center.”

The VMware vCenter Server Plugin for Virtensys is free of charge to all VIO-4000 customers and will be supported with the following VIO-4000 series models: VIO-4001, VIO-4004, VIO-4008, as well as the recently announced VIO-4010.

New Virtensys PCIe Sharing Solutions Brings Shared Enterprise SSD Technology to the Virtual Data Center

MANCHESTER, England and BEAVERTON, Ore. – August 29, 2011 – Virtensys™ Ltd, a provider of PCIe Sharing solutions, today announced two new Virtensys VIO-4000 models: the VIO-4010 and the VIO-4012. These new products incorporate the Virtensys award-winning PCIe sharing technology and Micron Technology’s high-performance RealSSD™ P300 and P320h enterprise solid state drives to help organizations remove I/O bottlenecks and extend the scale of today’s virtualized data centers.

Customers are now able to reap the benefits of PCIe Sharing and virtualized SSDs together, simplifying data center operations and realizing significant cost/power savings through increased efficiency. The Virtensys VIO-4010 appliance provides virtualized shared access to disk-based enterprise SSD resources through the use of its virtual RAID technology. The solution leverages the Micron P300 enterprise SSD and supports configurations that contain either 100 GB or 200 GB drives, capacity configurations will range from 800 GB to 1.6 TB, and will also include support for multiple virtualized 10 GbE vNICs. The VIO-4012 will utilize the Micron P320h PCIe based SSD solutions and will be sold in varying capacity configurations.

"Virtensys provides data center administrators with innovative new ways to experience the benefits of enterprise SSDs through their consolidated infrastructure models,” said Gary Gentry, general manager of the enterprise division of Micron’s NAND solutions group. “By leveraging Micron’s SATA and PCIe solid-state solutions, Virtensys is able to provide customers with a fast, reliable and power efficient approach to virtualized storage."

The VIO-4010 allows up to 16 servers to access a pool of shared SSDs, with each server accessing their own partition of high-performance storage. Virtualized SSD can be used for high-speed local data stores, as well as virtual swap partitions for hypervisors, which will allow SSD-based storage to be utilized as "host cache," an extension of the host's memory for swapping related functions. Also, virtualized SSD storage can be used for a server's boot partition/drive; servers no longer require local disk installed within the host itself. This makes servers "stateless" and removes the physical dependency on I/O resources; physical servers can be easily moved around the virtual data center as their I/O resources are managed centrally and can be assigned/re-assigned on-demand.

“For many IT environments today, I/O is a bottleneck. We are pleased to work with Micron to help our joint customers consolidate, share, and dynamically allocate I/O resources based on their application needs,” said John Nicholson, chief executive officer and chairman of Virtensys. “We are looking forward to our relationship with Micron and the combined benefits that we can now bring to our customers.”

Availability

The VIO-4010 is available now. The VIO-4012 will be available by the end of the year.

Joint Solution Helps IT Organizations Solve I/O Challenges and Achieve Greater Agility

MANCHESTER, England and BEAVERTON, Ore. – June 21, 2011 – Virtensys™ Ltd, a provider of I/O virtualization solutions, today announced its membership in the NetApp Alliance Partner Program as an Advantage Alliance Partner. Virtensys is collaborating with NetApp to integrate the series I/O virtualization appliances with NetApp® unified storage systems to help customers overcome I/O challenges. With this partnership, customers will be able to reap the benefits of I/O virtualization, simplifying data center operations and realizing significant cost and power savings through increased efficiency.

The Virtensys I/O virtualization appliances reduce and automate the repetitive and manual operations needed to set up, maintain, change and manage I/O profiles for a group of servers. Servers can be wired once and then re-purposed at will to support different applications without making any physical changes, reducing the number of resources needed to effectively run IT organizations.

“For many IT environments today, I/O can be a bottleneck. We are glad to work with NetApp to help our joint customers consolidate, share, and dynamically allocate I/O resources based on application needs, while receiving full connectivity bandwidth to the corporate network and storage infrastructures,” said Stephen Spellicy, vice president of marketing at Virtensys. “We are looking forward to our relationship with NetApp and the combined benefits that we can now bring to our customers.”

“With the NetApp Alliance Partner Program, we bring solution providers with complementary technologies together to help our customers increase flexibility and efficiency well beyond what they could do with one vendor alone,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Corporate Alliances at NetApp. “Virtensys’ membership in the NetApp Alliance Partner Program means that our customers can now have the latest I/O virtualization technologies in their current IT environments for a more agile and organized data center.”

About the NetApp Alliance Partner Program
The NetApp Alliance Partner Program provides qualified infrastructure and application providers with access to NetApp solutions, software development kits, technical support, training, certification, product information, and marketing and sales assistance. Customers benefit by having access to best-of-breed partner solutions that are tested to work with NetApp storage. Additional information on the NetApp Alliance Partner Program is available at www.netapp.com/alliances.

MANCHESTER, England and BEAVERTON, Ore. – June 8, 2011 – Virtensys™, Ltd, a provider of I/O virtualization solutions, announced today that it has been selected as a finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 North America award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the North American business region. The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across North America. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

"This year was very rewarding," said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. "The global economic situation has abated and there are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. Virtensys shows great promise; therefore, deserves to be among the finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring North America. We know that the 2011 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact."

“This comes on the heels of the recent industry recognition as a Network Products Guide Hot Companies and Best Products winner in the Virtualization category,” said Stephen Spellicy, director of marketing at Virtensys. “It is going to be a great year for us, as customers are now more than ever recognizing that I/O virtualization is solving the most complex I/O bottleneck challenges that they are experiencing today, allowing data centers to scale while realizing significant power savings.” The finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring North America Forum in Hollywood, California, June 13?15, 2011. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of June 15 at the event.