Think you know Seagate? It's time to take another look.

Charlene O'Hanlon

September 12, 2014

3 Min Read
Scott Horn vice president of Marketing at Seagate
Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate

Data storage vendor Seagate Technology (STX) is moving well beyond its roots in the consumer drive space into enterprise computing, Big Data and even cloud services and support.

It’s a huge leap for the company best known for its external hard drives that have no doubt saved the bacon of many a laptop user (including myself), but Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate, said it’s a natural­—and necessary—evolution for the company.

“We believe windows open at certain times in the market, and this is one of those times,” he said. “The combination of open source, software and what the big cloud services providers are doing are creating this ripple effect.”

What CSPs are doing, he said, is tearing apart the hardware stack and basically building their own solutions to meet their needs. Couple that with more movement around open compute and OpenStack, and you’ve got a full-on sea change for Seagate.

“We are starting to see segregation where enterprises don’t want solutions with margins built in, so this is our way to move up the stack, so to speak,” Horn said.

To that end, Seagate has established a Cloud Systems and Solutions group, which will deliver cloud systems and solutions for OEMs, the “do-it-yourself” crowd and other organizations, according to the company. CSS will offer solutions aimed at four distinct areas: integrated high performance computing (HPC); scalable, modular components and solutions; custom systems for OEMs; and cloud backup/restore, disaster recovery and rapid archive storage solutions. The solutions are a combination of existing Seagate technology as well as technology it acquired from its Xiratex buy late last year and the spinning back of its eVault subsidiary.

“We believe we are building an intelligent information infrastructure that includes core storage, systems capability, software and policy,” Horn said.

CSPs, in particular, glow brightly on Seagate’s radar for their unique system needs, he added.

“When we talk to CSPs, it’s a different conversation than the rest of the market. Their problem set is more varied in things like density, power, cooling, etc., so they’re open to what will save money and power and not so worried about form factors,” Horn said. “As their business has evolved, they’re realizing they have to have a strategic approach to cost factors in data center. So we’re now talking through things like a total lifecycle approach to use more recyclable materials in our manufacturing, even helping recycle the drives. The degrees of freedom in the conversation with a CSP are different.”

The new CSS technology lineup includes the ClusterStor 9000, a scale-out storage technology based on the open source Lustre file system and designed for HPC and Big Data environments. Also new is the Seagate EVault Enterprise Backup and Recovery Appliance, which accommodates up to 100TB of usable capacity, according to the company.

“We are great at hard drives and what we do well there we can apply to systems,” Horn said. “We see an opportunity to be bigger and more relevant to more people.

“The company is changing,” he added. “By the end of the decade we will look like a different company.”

I would say Seagate’s already well down that road.

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