Midrange enterprise storage system provider Xiotech said Nov. 7 that it has acquired Seagate Technology’s Advanced Storage Architecture division, which consists of about 100 developers in Colorado Springs, Colo.
In the acquisition, Xiotech purchased assets of the ASA business and acquired a license to the associated technology. Financial details of the transaction were not made available.
Seagate, based in Scotts Valley, Calif., is the world’s largest hard disk drive maker.
“This is a skunk-works-type operation,” Seagate spokesperson Woody Monroy told eWEEK. “They are working on developing a new storage architecture that can scale multiple markets and aggregate storage drives to make them appear [ostensibly through virtualization] as a single peripheral.”
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The Seagate ASA group had been in operation since about 2000 but hadn’t brought any of its technologies to market, Monroy told eWEEK.
Ellen Lary will serve as the vice president and general manager of this team. Lary, who most recently was a consultant to the Seagate ASA group, became vice president and general manager of Digital Equipment’s Storage Product Division in 1996, where she grew the business to $1.9 billion in revenue.
After Compaq’s acquisition of Digital, she was appointed vice president of Business Critical Storage for Compaq.
Steve Sicola, general manager of the Seagate ASA group, will serve as the chief technology officer for Xiotech. Sicola has more than 29 years in the storage industry, was a Compaq Fellow, and was chief technology officer of StorageWorks at Compaq and Digital.
“We think that the ASA technology will in time transform the market’s perceptions about storage capacity, performance and reliability,” said Casey Powell, president and CEO, Xiotech. “In time, we expect the ASA group to provide significant additional revenue to Xiotech.”
Xiotech, based in Eden Prairie, Minn., is a provider of data storage and data protection products and services to midsize organizations. It makes the Magnitude line of midrange storage solutions that includes Fibre Channel and iSCSI-based SAN (storage area network) systems and a comprehensive set of data protection solutions.
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