Advised by Bank of American Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, the combined company will result in the largest consumer based digital data storage companies.

FORBES: Consolidation In The Hard Drive Market As Western Digital Pays $4.3 Billion For Hitachi's GST Unit

This model is driving the growth of digital storage in data centers and thus the sale of hard disk drives, tape storage and flash memory used in enterprise storage tiers for these data centers.

FORBES: Changing Digital Storage Requirements for Clouds and Mobile Devices

With the amount of digital data in data centers growing annually and storage budgets highly constrained open source storage system designs can fill an important niche for data centers and IT people comfortable with installing and maintaining their own hardware.

FORBES: Open Source Storage Changes Industry Cost Structure