Seagate Technology, a worldwide leader in storage solutions, today announced it has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu, China's largest web services firm, in the areas of low-cost online storage, archiving and Big Data analysis.

Under the agreement, Baidu will give priority to Seagate products when considering components for all Baidu servers and storage facilities. In return Seagate will align with Baidu as a Strategic Customer and give priority to Baidu when providing enterprise storage products and relevant support, as well as maintain a dedicated engineering team for Baidu. Seagate will supply enterprise capacity and performance products as part of the relationship. The agreement also allows for joint research in new technology projects in the areas of Cold Storage, Big Data analysis and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Big Data analysis is the process of examining large amounts of various types of data to find useful information and patterns to assist in decision making.

Cold Storage refers to data that is less frequently accessed data on Cloud Computing platforms and which generally use lower cost storage solutions. For example, the historical log on the Baidu search engine or backup data would likely be in Cold Storage.

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) allows data to be squeezed closer together on a disk drive - like shingles or tiles on a roof -- allowing for drives to accommodate up to 25 percent more data per platter without compromising data integrity or reliability.

All of these technologies are cutting-edge and aimed at helping leading companies such as Baidu deal with the massive volumes of data which are accessed, uploaded and stored daily.

"Baidu stores and manages data from billions of users request each day, including webpages, photos, documents and all kinds of audio/video. We have been committed to elevate our capabilities of Big Data storage, processing and management to serve our users better," said Mr. Wang Jing, Senior Vice President of Baidu. "By establishing the strategic partnership with Seagate and enhancing our collaborations in Cloud Storage and Big Data, we can better address the various challenges of data storage in the Big Data environments, and enhance storage quality, efficiency and reliability."

With the development of Cloud technologies, the mobile Internet, open source computing, and social networks, the world is making major inroads in the field Big Data. As the cornerstone of Big Data storage and analysis, the Cloud enables the efficient integration and flexible distribution of IT resources, while intelligent storage is the core that allows for Cloud services. To address the various challenges of data storage in the Big Data environments, Seagate and Baidu have established a strategic partnership between themselves on a worldwide basis.

"Cloud storage will become a natural trend for storage technology development in the future. As the global leader in intelligent storage, Seagate is actively transitioning to the Cloud, and sees China as a strategic focus of Cloud storage," said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate's President, Global Markets and Customers. "The Internet industry uses Cloud storage, and Seagate has always paid great attention to and made continuous investments in it. We are looking forward to seamless cooperation with Baidu, working closely to develop China's Cloud market and associated technologies."