Flash house Fusion-io has acquired low-profile British start-up ID7 and with it the primary developers of SCST, the open source storage subsystem used by EMC, HP and IBM and anybody else dabbling in storage for Linux boxes.

The acquisition led the All Things Digital blog to observe that “everyone doing anything in the area of storage, or working toward any kind of software-defined storage scheme, will [now] have to deal with Fusion-io.”

SCST, which expects to get more engineering resources out of the alignment, enables replication, thin provisioning, deduplication, high availability and automatic backup on any Linux server or appliance.

According to Fusion, the SCST core provides a consistent, unified interface between SCSI target drivers, the Linux kernel and storage systems by connecting target drivers with a physical or emulated storage back-end.

It supports data exchange via SCSI, including iSCSI, Fibre Channel, FCoE, SAS, InfiniBand (SRP) and Wide (parallel) SCSI.

The very low overhead of the SCST subsystem delivers maximum performance and scalability in software-defined storage architectures.

It also appears that Fusion-io and ID7 have been collaborating on software for the ION Data Accelerator, which transforms industry-standard servers into shared storage appliances.

ID7, which will remain in the UK where it is, will be part of the ION team.

Fusion said it would maintain and continue to contribute to the opens source version of SCST while it also works on a commercial version.

Started in 2006, ID7 specializes in developing storage software solutions across all types of interfaces including iSCSI, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand.

Financial terms underlying the acquisition were not disclosed.