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In an industry where corporate mergers often resemble a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean where the buccaneers board their victim’s ships to loot and smash everything in sight, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see the pairing of LSI Corporation and Agere producing such interesting and promising results. Back in 2007, I publicly voiced my worries about whether LSI would take the easy path by stripping out the technologies and product lines that complimented their storage business unit and selling off or plowing under the remaining telecom and networking portions of Agere’s operations. Even though I recanted my prediction a year later, I still had lingering doubts until I attended LSI’s recent analyst briefings and got a firsthand look at a very different future for the company.

Instead of the smash-and-grab tactics employed by so many of his competitors, Abhi Talwakar, LSI’s CEO seems to have taken a strategic approach that has focused the company on its two greatest strengths – networking and storage business sectors that should be much less affected by the economic turbulence that’s presently afflicting most markets. Naturally, the re-alignment did involve selling off business units that did not fit (such as Agere’s cellular and consumer groups) but, for the most part, both companies’ major resources show signs of surviving the transition quite nicely.

From what I learned at the briefings I attended it looks like LSI is devoting enough resources to the surviving business units to make them even more competitive than they were before the merger. LSI’s recent announcement of an extensive family of networking, media/baseband and communication protocol processors specifically targeted at wireless infrastructure applications is one of several initiatives that indicate that they are making the necessary investments to build a leadership position in this market. The high-performance interconnect technology that debuted with the introduction of their Axxia comms processors looks like one of the few architectures that has enough bandwidth, flexibility, and intelligence to allow a cluster of heterogeneous processor cores work efficiently together without starving each other for memory or I/O resources.

On the storage side of their operation, LSI’s aggressive roll-out of products aimed at solid-state storage and 6 Gbps SAS/SATA products also indicate that they are playing for keeps in this relatively recession-resistant market. Their growing focus on solid-state storage will be especially interesting to watch since it looks like it is just starting to gain traction in high-performance data centers where its blazing speed will shift the bottleneck from hard drive to the RAID subsystem itself. LSI says it’s working to accelerate this part of the system and hybrid HDD/SDD solutions that are expected to provide a very cost-effective performance boost for many applications.

There were lots of other interesting tidbits that came up during my briefings at LSI – and a few more that surfaced during the informal pub crawl that spontaneously erupted after the official wrap-up dinner party. Time and space limitations (and personal discretion) prevent me from presenting them all here but I will suggest that LSI’s interest in 10GBASE-T Ethernet may be a harbinger that the long-promised technology may be finally ready to take its place in the mass market. LSI’s close relationships with nearly all of the leading networking equipment manufacturers gives credibility to their prediction that 10BASE-T will become something close to a checkbox requirement on the motherboards of servers and other high-performance computing equipment in the near future. Since LIS does not have a 10G PHY of its own, it’s interesting to speculate as to who they will decide to partner with – or whether they will try to acquire company such as Aquantia or SolarFlare pursuit of an end-to-end solution. Of course LSI would not address my question directly but the quiet smiles I got when I asked about a 10G make/buy decision indicate that I’ll be probably covering these developments sooner, rather than later right here at TechBites.

Comments? Questions? Thoughts on which 10G PHY company LSI has its eye on?

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