The OCZ Technology Group said this week that its OCZ Talos SAS solid-state drives have been certified to run inside Drobo’s B1200i iSCSI SAN family of products, which are resold by the latter’s partners. OCZ makes all the regular claims of offering energy efficiency and increased performance, in addition to availability.

“Drobo is a leader in data storage products for both professionals and businesses and we are thrilled that they have qualified and selected our enterprise-class Talos SAS SSDs for their business oriented solutions,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. “This collaboration is a perfect example of extending the benefits of our solid state drive technology within a complete solution to deliver superior application optimized storage for Small and Medium Business IT.”

Drobo’s offering is targeting mainly small to medium businesses, which require a more economic solution to support virtualization and other features on a smaller-scale. One of the biggest advantages the B1200i offers is a function called Automated Data-Aware Tiering, which does pretty much what it says in the title.

QLogic had some similar news in the storage space yesterday, although the company itself provides networking gear.  The manufacturer announced that its networking components will ship with both the new Gen8 HP server and Dell’s 12th generation PowerEdge. While the two hardware titans have a lot of competition to deal with, QLogic itself has put itself in a very good position overall considering the sheer hype that surrounds these two products. (Gen8 in particular is expected to receive a warm welcome from the market, thanks to the box’s cost-effectiveness and a very long line-up of other technical improvements.)

Before QLogic came FalconStor. A couple days ago Dell OEM’d one of the data protection vendor’s core offerings  for a new migration service.