Symbios Logic

» see symbios.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Symbios Logic sold the part of a computer nobody chose. If a server shipped with SCSI in 1996 there was a decent chance the controller was theirs, and the most visible that name ever got was a line of white text during boot, between the memory count and the operating system. LSI Logic's announcement put 1997 revenue at $620 million with $70 million of operating income before one-off charges, which is a substantial business assembled entirely out of other companies' bills of materials.

The lineage is much longer than the name. NCR set up a microelectronics division in Miamisburg, Ohio in 1972 to make chips for its own computers, and by 1981 seventy percent of the output was going to outside customers. AT&T took over NCR in 1991, so the division became part of AT&T Global Information Solutions. NCR's storage business was folded into it in 1993, which is how a chip shop ended up also selling disk arrays. On 15 February 1995 Hyundai Electronics America bought the unit and let it operate under a name of its own for the first time.

Less than four years later it was sold again. LSI Logic signed a stock purchase agreement with Hyundai on 28 June 1998, announced it the next morning, and closed on 6 August for about $760 million in cash including assumed liabilities, funded from its own reserves plus a credit line syndicated by ABN AMRO. The 8-K filed that month says it in the flattest available words: as a result of the transaction, Symbios is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Registrant.

None of this was ever a purchase decision anybody made at home. SCSI was what you paid extra for, and on a machine in Turkey in 1998 the disk was IDE and the interesting cable in the room was the one going to the phone socket.

~ the record ~

~ where the name came from ~

The history page they put on symbios.com explains it directly. Symbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship, is the foundation for both our name and our business strategy. The same page claims the world's first SCSI protocol chip and over a third of the world SCSI chip market, with 2,400 people worldwide and a head office in Fort Collins. Those numbers are the company's own, and nobody outside it was checking them.

~ what the buyer kept ~

LSI wanted the SCSI silicon and the disk array business came attached. In August 2001 the unit was merged with Syntax Systems and renamed LSI Logic Storage Systems. In 2004 it became Engenio, filed to go public on 19 February and withdrew the registration that August. NetApp bought it in the end, announced on 9 March 2011 and completed in May, paying $480 million in cash for a division that had turned over $705 million the year before.

So the disk array half outlived the Symbios name by thirteen years, and changed owners once more on the way out.

~ 53c8xx ~

What lasted longest was a numbering scheme. The SCSI chips were the 53C8xx family, and the Linux driver written against them is called sym53c8xx, which is still in the kernel tree today. Those three letters are the only part of the company most people have ever typed, and almost nobody typing them knows they are an abbreviation of a word about mutual benefit.

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