History 1999: Seagate in SAN Via Acquisition of Xiotech

Seagate Technology has yet to enter the NAS market, unlike quite a few of its rivals in the HDD industry, including Maxtor, Quantum and WD.

But it has just taken a step towards SAN technology, with its most recent acquisition – for $360 million in stock – Xiotech Corp.

The latter, a privately-held company, founded in 1995 in Eden Prairie, MN by Philip Soran, president and CEO, and Larry Aszmann, CTO.

Last October, it ended a $20 million venture funding.

Xiotech had 17 sales offices in the US and Canada offering its SAN in a box with clustering capability, based on a software architecture called Magnitude.

The company already incorporated Seagate’s HDDs for its solutions.

As always, the question arises about how certain customers will react, in this case those also involved in SAN who may not look favorably when a hardware manufacturer – and one of their suppliers – such as Seagate enters the subsystems market to become a competitor.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 143 on December 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.