Seagate to Acquire SAN Pioneer Xiotech

With an eye on an emerging storage area network (SAN) market, Seagate Technology Inc. (Scotts Valley, CA), the world's largest independent maker of storage drives for computers, has agreed to buy privately-held XIOtech Corp. (Eden Prairie, MN) for approximately $360 million in Seagate common stock.

A developer of virtual storage and SAN products, XIOtech designs, manufactures, and markets high performance, application-driven storage solutions, including the XIOtech Magnitude—a SAN in a box. Magnitude's software-based architecture provides over 3 tetrabytes (trillions of bytes) of high performance, centralized storage that can be accessed continuously by multiple heterogeneous network servers.