SMART Storage Systems, Inc. — commonly "SMART Storage" — was an enterprise solid-state-drive maker headquartered at 39870 Eureka Drive, Newark, California. It was founded in 2008 as the SSD business of SMART Modular Technologies and was spun off as a separate company in early 2012. It was majority-owned by SMART Worldwide Holdings, the vehicle formed when Silver Lake Partners and founder Iain MacKenzie took SMART Modular private in 2011 (~$645M). SanDisk acquired SMART Storage for roughly $307M in August 2013; about 250 employees joined SanDisk. Objective Analysis and The Register reported ~$25M in revenue in its final reported quarter (roughly $100M annualized).
Products. SMART Storage designed and sold enterprise SATA and SAS SSDs, sold largely to storage and server OEMs for rebranding. Its lines included the Optimus SAS family and the CloudSpeed SATA family, differentiated by the proprietary Guardian Technology Platform (FlashGuard, DataGuard, EverGuard) for MLC endurance, data-path protection and power-fail protection. It also served defense and industrial markets, technology partly gained through its 2008 acquisition of Adtron. It is an operating company, not a non-practicing entity.
Litigation posture. In the tracked data SMART Storage appears only as a defendant (2 cases, 0 as plaintiff) — an operating company defending against patent assertions. Both matters are California venues (N.D. Cal. and C.D. Cal.), i.e., the parties' home districts rather than plaintiff-friendly districts such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable cases. Netlist, Inc. v. SMART Storage Systems, Inc. (N.D. Cal., No. 4:13-cv-05889-YGR) also named Diablo Technologies and SanDisk as defendants and centered on the ULLtraDIMM memory module developed by Diablo and SMART; Netlist asserted seven memory-module patents plus trade-secret and trademark claims. The parallel Netlist, Inc. v. SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. et al. (C.D. Cal.) was Netlist's earlier 2013 complaint against SMART Modular and affiliates; SMART Modular filed its own declaratory-judgment action in N.D. Cal. The N.D. Cal. case was stayed in April 2015 pending inter partes review of the asserted patents.
Sources: SanDisk/Silver Lake press coverage (The Register, Objective Analysis), Crunchbase, court filings via CourtListener/Casetext.