Seagate Technology and Xyratex announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Seagate will acquire all outstanding shares of Xyratex in a transaction valued at approximately $374 million. Although not a game-changer, this acquisition will bring Western Digital’s arch-rival some vertical integration in manufacturing processes (Xyratex‘s proprietary test equipments are used for testing hard drives before they are shipped to customers) and expand its HPC storage solutions portfolio. No wonder, then, that Seagate intends to maintain the ClusterStor business unit as a separate entity and continue to support Xyratex’s numerous OEM customers. The latest addition to the line, ClusterStor 9000, was officially announced a few days before SC’13, featuring a 60 GB/s throughput per rack.