Seagate is entering the cloud hardware business and moving beyond its traditional approach to storage.
The step is a rather large leap for the vendor known for its external hard drives. Despite this, Seagate believes the move is a natural progression.
"We believe windows open at certain times in the market, and this is one of those times," said Scott Horn, VP of marketing at Seagate. "The combination of open source, software and what the big cloud services providers are doing [is] creating this ripple effect."
The announcement includes a new division at Seagate called the Cloud Systems and Solutions (CSS) division. This part of the company will deliver cloud systems and solutions to original equipment manufacturer's and other organizations.
"Organizations are looking for cost-effective ways to harness data and create actionable information," said Jamie Lerner, president of Cloud Systems and Solutions at Seagate. "Seagate is bringing an open approach to the Intelligent Information Infrastructure program. We are applying our experience working with cloud service providers worldwide to create systems and solutions that manage next-generation workloads with the scale, performance and economy aligned to business needs."
CSS will offer solutions aimed at four different areas. These areas include integrated high performance computing; scalable, modular components and solutions; custom systems for OEMs; and cloud backup and restoration systems.
"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 continued.
As part of the new CSS lineup, the company unveiled ClusterStor 9000, a fully integrated Lustre-based solution for HPC and big data workloads. Not only that, but the company also announced the new Seagate EVault Enterprise Backup and Recovery Appliance, with up to 100 TB of usable storage.
"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. By the end of the decade we will look like a different company."
Seagate certainly seems to be well on the road to changing. The newly announced products and part of the company will set Seagate up to continue being a leader in all aspects of the data storage industry. That's not to say, however, that Seagate will not continue to provide top-of-the-line non-cloud based storage.
