14 DAY TRIAL // Now that terabytes are the norm of the day, Seagate is looking towards the future and seeing exabytes. And since it's such a well-known and powerful storage company, it's assimilating others, in this case Xyratex.
Xyratex makes expandable storage subsystems, disk drive heads and media to enterprise storage platforms and High Performance Computing environments, among other things.
Seagate decided that its intellectual property and staff would help it further improve its own products and operations, so it bought it.
The company is building higher-capacity drives all the time, and feels that, if nothing else, Xyratex will help with the testing and, consequently, reduce the time it takes to invent the next top-capacity magnetic storage unit.
"Exabyte growth is accelerating, and we are building higher capacity drives to address this growth," said Dave Mosley, president of operations and technology at Seagate. "The time required to properly test these higher capacity drives is increasing dramatically, making it strategically important to have uninterrupted access to world-class test equipment and engineering resources."
For us normal folks, this acquisition probably won't mean much, since it looks like something more likely to help on the enterprise drive and application front. We'll see though.