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Seagate Technology purchased Mirra Inc. Wednesday afternoon, adding storage appliance technology for the home and small office.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but were not materially significant. Mirras 34 employees will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate, effective immediately.
The acquisition gives Seagate a NAS and wide-area-storage solution for the home and small office, the next step in the evolution of consumer hard drives.
Once a product designed solely for the PC chassis, Seagates storage portfolio now includes include external drives and portable options, but lacked the network-attached storage option that rivals such as Western Digital developed.
“It fits really well into our business,” said Brian Dexheimer, Seagates executive vice president of its storage business, in an interview Wednesday afternoon.
“We have a tremendous amount of content getting into that environment in this country, an explosion from the digital home into the networked home.”
Mirra chief executive Thomas Shea said that there is no “secret sauce” to the hardware within Mirras appliance, known as the Personal Server.
Within each Mirra box is a standard PC motherboard and Seagate hard drive, Shea said.
When asked if the Mirra technology would be extended to other products within the Seagate portfolio, company executives responded that the Mirra boxes would be released in new configurations and form factors.
More importantly, the Mirra services also allow wide-area network storage, allowing shared access to files, such as photos, over the Internet.
The software allows remote management of stored files, part of a Seagate strategy to facilitate the management and coordination of user content across various clients, the company said.
The software also allows trusted email access into the appliance for management purposes.