Israel is where the USB flash drive was invented and where innovative companies such as Anobit and XtremIO are drawing American companies to their shores in droves to get a piece of the intellectual property pie.
与此同时，EMC在以色列试图strike a deal to buy XtremeIO, NetApp和戴尔也re vying for the flash storage array maker's intellectual property.
Is Google Drive ready for prime time?
EMC's acquisition of the NAND flash storage company followed a similar move by Apple when itpurchased Israeli-based flash drive maker Anobitin January.
"Particularly in flash memory they have really good talent over there," said Ryan Chien, an analyst with market research firm IHS iSuppli.
Flash storage is at the forefront of technology powering current industry trends such as cloud services, virtualization and online transaction processing. Because of that, flash development is a red-hot industry, analysts said. That fact has not been lost on Israel.
Israel has long been a nation that draws in big corporate R&D facilities and acquisitions. Microsoft and Cisco both built their first non-U.S. R&D facilities there, for instance. Google has two R&D centers in Israel now; Intel has four. Intel also hastwo manufacturing facilities
In 2010-2011, Israel was ranked No. 1 in the world in terms of the quality of its scientific research institutions by theGeneva-based World Economic Forum。It also ranked seventh in its capacity for innovation.
EMC本身在以色列中有大约800名员工，其中包括VMware开发的R＆D中心的一部分。2010年，Micron还购买了Numonyx，它在以色列中运行闪光制造。
R&D centers in Israel (Source: State of Israel Ministry of Industry, Trade & Labor)
In flash, software rules
When it comes to engineering NAND flash storage products, writing code to manage how the non-volatile memory is used is key, especially as the size of flash chips continues to shrink. (Smaller chips increase the likelihood of increased data errors as electrons leak through thinner and thinner silicon cell walls.) Controlling how data is laid out on flash chips also results in longer product life.
On top of managing the NAND flash itself, solid-state drive (SSD) systems need software that enables optimum performance in conjunction with I/O hungry applications and hard disk drives. For example, tiering technology migrates data from low-end disks to high-end disks to flash drives.
以色列一直闪存的发展ment. For example, USB flash drives were invented by the Israeli company M-Systems in partnership with IBM. M-Systems was bought out by flash drive maker SanDisk in 2006.
"EMC is looking at the NAND resources in Israel, scientists who can handle all the issues with lower-lithography NAND," Chien said.
In 2010, EMC hired Orna Berry -- formerly the chief scientist of Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor -- to be the general manager of its Center of Excellence (COE) facility in Beersheba, directly adjacent to Ben-Gurion University. The COE is responsible for R&D in areas such as security, high availability systems and flash memory and runs EMC's anti-fraud service for the company's worldwide user base.
The Israeli difference
Because of Israel's diminutive size and its location, technological innovation is more a matter of "life and death," Berry said. "Many of the technologies, if we don't invent them, we also [could not] buy them. It's a political issue. Consequently, we often need to be self-sufficient in certain technologies. On the other hand, being first to market often gives us an opportunity to have a place in the market."
以色列的军事工业综合体也与学术界紧紧交织在一起，帮助开发和推广促进技术创新和企业孵化的方案。贝瑞说：“我据说几乎比任何其他政府，也许是芬兰和新加坡的例外，也许是芬兰和新加坡的例外，以色列一直专注于转向经济或国防价值，”贝利说。
Mark Peters是市场研究公司ESG的分析师，同意。以色列必须提供的是大量学生们都沉浸在数学和科学中。彼得斯说，该国没有自然资源谈论并不会出口任何重要的零售项目。
"When was the last time you saw a tag that said 'Made in Israel?'" Peters said. "For Israel, education is all about sophisticated science and math. As a country, they're not focused on low-margin products. They're always at the advanced level."
Israel'stop schools, such as Tel Aviv University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, are bastions of high-tech education.
此外，Peters指出，自20世纪90年代苏联秋季以来，俄罗斯教育良好良好俄罗斯人已经移民移植到以色列。彼得斯还指出了高级军事研发支出，以及一个强大的风险资本主义社区，为国家的技术成功。
Big companies on the prowl
Every large technology company - from IBM to Hewlett-Packard - is considering acquiring a full range of solid-state products, from drives to arrays, Peters said. If they don't, they'll be left behind.
"They've got to be shopping around everything," he said. "Management, ultimately, for solid-state technology has got to be up and down the entire stack," he said.
例如，去年闪存驱动器制造商SanDisk purchased Pliant Technologiesfor its enterprise-class flash drives. It then turned around and购买Flash Management软件供应商Flashsoft这是二月的。
EMC's acquisition roadmap to date has included nine Israeli-based companies, including Kashya, nLayers and Proactivity. But XtremIO is its largest acquisition by far, with EMC reportedly spending $430 million on a company that has yet to ship its first product.
While the XtremIO buyout raised the eyebrows of some industry pundits who doubted the wisdom of the deal, according to Peters and Kobi Rozengarten, a managing partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP). JVP is one of several major investors in XtremIO, which garnered $25 million in venture funding since its founding in 2009.
Peters and Rozengarten said EMC wanted superior "architectural" software -- and got it.
"Today's flash is a very unreliable device with poor retention and endurance (especially when scaling to 20 nanometers and bellow)," Rozengarten said. "This requires a sophisticated ECC based on [a digital signal processor] and new flash controller know-how. In this space, Israeli's companies are leading with companies such as Anobit and Densbits."
事实上，以色列为许多领先的公司和技术而成的集线器，包括半导体，通讯，安全和储存，Rozengarten表示。
As a result, it has become a nation of high-profile startups that don't last long before they're scooped up by big international players, Peters said.
Outside Israel, the flash storage market is flush with vendors for the picking, from all-flash array makers such as Nimbus, Violin Memory, Texas Memory Systems, Pure Storage, and Whiptail to PCIe flash card vendors such as Fusion-io, Intel, Micron and Virident. There are also all-flash appliance makers such as SolidFire and Tintri. Of the latter companies, Violin is the least likely to be acquired asit has its sights on going public。
Flash arrays: the next battle ground
Chien expects flash array products to bethe next battle groundamong vendors. The industry will consolidate quickly over the next several years, he said, as big storage vendors such as Dell, NetApp and HP rush to scoop up flash technology in much the same way他们做了数据重复删除公司几年前。
That, no doubt, played into EMC's decision to snap up XtremIO.
One reason for the battle is that flash storage's ultra-high performance characteristics address specific applications that are on the leading edge of corporate IT projects -- namely cloud, virtualization and web-based services.
For example, cloud service providers want arrays that have the ability to offer multi-tenancy, or many users on a single server or array, but without hitting I/O performance. Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs) place a heavy I/O burden on servers when large corporate deployments boot up in the morning and shut down and refresh at night.
Although Dell declined to comment on whether it's in the hunt for flash storage vendors, a NetApp spokesperson said by e-mail that the company is "always on the lookout for opportunities to acquire technology and businesses that complement and enhance our product and solution portfolio.
"We cannot disclose details around our interest in a specific space or target," the spokesperson said. "NetApp remains interested in pursuing corporate development opportunities that help us to gain share, whether it be through acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and/or reseller agreements."
When it came to an XtremIO deal, both NetApp and Dell were at a disadvantage. EMC had been an investor in the company from the beginning, according to at least two sources.
更重要的是，彼得斯说，EMC不是在寻找另一种闪存硬件产品。它想要Xtremio的Flash管理知识产权 - 该软件。
In remarks after the purchase, EMC spokesman Dave Farmer did not refer to XtremIO's product as a flash array but as "an architecture."
"EMC, whatever else you may think of them, doesn't do a lot of stupid things," Peters said. "For the next few years, the industry will be focused on storage management and not flash technology."
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at@lucasmearian或订阅卢卡斯的RSS饲料。他的电子邮件地址是lmearian@computerworld.com。
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This story, "Why Israel is a hotbed for flash storage innovation" was originally published byComputerworld 。