OCZ Technology Group Inc fka OCZTQ

[ciciagt]

January 11, 2012, 3:06 PM ET.OCZ Ups Competition With FIO, Says Sterne Agee.
By Tiernan Ray
Sterne Agee’s Alex Kurtz today reiterates a Buy rating on shares of enterprise storage vendor OCZ (OCZ), and a $13 price target, writing that a meeting with the company’s management here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas suggest the company may be able to take business away from Fusion-IO (FIO), and may already be doing so.Kurtz writes OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen was asked if he’s stealing Fusion’s business with Facebook.

“From his response it sounded like they are in a strong position to contend for business in the Social Media space but he wouldn’t directly comment on Facebook,” writes Kurtz.

“Our discussions with contacts close to the social media website have always suggested additional suppliers would be qualified, and we believe OCZ has competitive products for this market.”

Kurtz also likes the company’s acquisition of privately held Sanrad of Mahwah, New Jersey, announced on Monday. Sanrad’s “application acceleration” gear may help propel OCZ’s competitiveness, as it helps alleviate problems enterprises encounter when running VMWare’s (VMW) software “vSphere” and “vMotion”:

The challenge of IO contention within vSphere is creating new challenges for PCIe-based storage in the host […] The SANRAD/VXL architecture works at the host level to provide application acceleration in lieu of a software agent in the OS approach that ioTurbine is pursuing with Fusion-io. SANRAD’s approach creates a pool of virtualized cache which enables seamless vMotion support that in turn provides scalable cache coherency across physical clusters. We would also note that SANRAD’s background as a virtual storage appliance company provides SANRAD with a technical skill set around storage virtualization that appears somewhat unique in this market.

OCZ shares today are up 6 cents, or 0.8%, at $7.68.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/01/11/ocz-ups-competition-with-fio-says-sterne-agee/?mod=yahoobarrons