A New Spin on Storage - What to expect now
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Seagate seeks to continue leading the way in the development arena as well with its planned shift from longitudinal disk drives to perpendicular ones. Perpendicular drives use fewer heads and disks as you go up in density. You should begin seeing the transition on 2.5-inch notebook drives around 2007.
Several other mergers in 2005 have helped to set the stage in the storage world as well. Sun Microsystem's $4.1 billion purchase of StorageTek made it clear that they are preparing to fight for a piece of the storage market. Not to mention that they had been actively developing their CIS (Content Infrastructure System), a powerful turnkey archive system, prior to that.
And that doesn't begin to cover the mergers that have affected the security side of all of this, most notably Symantec's acquisition of Veritas for a cool $13.5 billion. Prior to the Maxtor takeover, Seagate also purchased Mirra, Inc., a data management and backup vendor. And the marriages continue; Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of AppIQ opened doors for HP's storage management lineup. It seems as if everyone wants to get their hands on a piece of the multi-billion dollar storage industry.
So, what exactly does all of this mean? The recent mergers should have a good effect on the technology side of things. We should begin to see further advancements released at a faster rate due to better research and development, added manufacturing facilities, and the teaming up of engineers. And for those worried about prices rising as a result of Seagate's Maxtor takeover: I wouldn't. Let's not forget that Seagate is still in a struggle with only three major PC manufacturers available.
All in all, I believe the mergers, specifically the Seagate-Maxtor merger, will have a positive effect for consumers at every level.
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