Why Seagate spent $374m on Xyratex: It's part of a cloud system

Comment Seagate has recruited an EVP for its cloud business and shone a light on where that business is going.

Former Cisco bod Sri Hosakote joins Jamie Lerner's Cloud Systems and Solutions (CSS) group as an EVP and reports to Lerner, who joined in February this year. Both men are ex-Cisco, so Lerner has recruited a known quantity. Hosakote joins another recent addition to that group: Mike Palmer, who is an SVP (one rung below EVP), and general manager for cloud solutions.

Lerner says: "Seagate is uniquely able to innovate across the full information infrastructure stack, from the media and devices, to the enclosures, to the management layer, to the operating system and file system."

But full stack or no, there is no mention of compute or networking here, no hint of convergence. Seagate will extend "innovation from the device into the information infrastructure, both on-site and in the Cloud".

It will be "going beyond our leading disk drive business to deliver cloud systems and solutions for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and “do-it-yourself organisations.”

DIY organisations? Sounds like enterprises.

Hosakote was previously SVP and GM of Cisco's switching and wireless platform group looking after the engineering side. At Seagate CSS, he will be managing the systems business, looking after "the creation and delivery of High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions and custom, modularised systems for OEMs with an emphasis on converged infrastructure."

This means he gets to oversee the management of the former Xyratex business and its engineering team.

In other words he is responsible for the Lustre-using ClusterStor array business, which counts Cray as an OEM with its Sonnexion storage arrays. We think Seagate sees ClusterStor as a classic networked array and, at present, has no convergence ideas.

However, we might expect that ClusterStor will make better use of the intelligent management possibilities inherent in its use of Seagate disk drives and, no doubt, Pulsar line of SSDs in the future.

We might also ask ourselves if Seagate has ideas of adding its Kinetic disk drive line to its in-house array products? ®