Reading Time: 2 minutes

Seagate and Dot Hill Systems have announced a definitive agreement where Seagate will acquire Dot Hill to increase their storage portfolio. Seagate has a long storage history especially in hard disks: they’ve developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive in 1980 (the 5-megabyte ST-506), on 2006 Seagate acquired Maxtor, on 2011 acquired the Samsung‘s HDD business.

But they have also a storage experience: in 2014 Seagate acquired Xyratex a storage systems company, used in most storage enclousure. The same year it acquired LSI’s Flash Enterprise PCIe flash and SSD controller products, and its engineering capabilities. And X-IO it’s all started in 1999 with Seagate Technologies with the idea of build a new zero touch design storage: Seagate invested over $100 million in this project, but on 2007 this technology was acquired by Xiotech (in 2007) and Intellinget Storage Element (ISE) has began is life on 2008.

But now with Dot Hill’s external storage array-based systems (such as the AssuredSAN 4824) and software products will add a significant amount of flexibility to Seagate’s future releases and will be offered as part of Seagate’s Cloud Systems and Electronics Solutions business. Seagate specifies that Dot Hill’s storage technology IP portfolio and software capabilities will help them further innovate and add value to their OEM customer base.

Dot Hill has a long enterprise storage history (see Powering The Cloud 2012  and Powering The Cloud 2013 reports) with interesting products (included hybrid storage) at interesting prices.

This Seagate’s move seems an answer on what happen with the main competitor in traditional HDD where Wester Digital with sTec to build HGST (formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies or Hitachi GST).

But HGST has also a wide flash offering and other flash vendors have also done several acquisitions (like Samsung with Proximal Data or SanDisk with Fusion-IO).

Seagate needs now to build and consolidate a flash offerting and this acquisition seems only a first step.

See also:

Share

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.