This week Cray announced that it is picking up Seagate’s ClusterStor HPC array business for an undisclosed sum as part of a “strategic deal and partnership.”

“In short we’re effectively transitioning the bulk of the ClusterStor product line to Cray,” said CEO Peter Ungaro on the company’s Q2 investor call yesterday.

Cray will be taking over development, support, manufacturing and sales of the ClusterStor product line, including Cray’s Sonexion scale out Lustre storage system, which is based on ClusterStor. The supercomputing company expects to add more than 100 Seagate employees, primarily in R&D, customer service and channel and reseller support.

“Cray will be a great home for the ClusterStor, employees, customers and partners,” said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Storage Systems Group at Seagate.

Seagate acquired the ClusterStor assets for $374 million in 2014, when it purchased Xyratex. The Lustre arrays have their origins in a company called ClusterStor that was founded by Lustre inventor Peter Braam and whose assets Xyratex acquired in 2010.

Cray has been working with Seagate since 2012, and is the biggest OEM for the ClusterStor line. Supporting Seagate’s other ClusterStor resellers figures prominently in Cray’s play here. The arrangement “provides a new route to market for our storage solution and potentially other products down the road,” said Ungaro.

Brian C. Henry, executive vice president and chief financial officer for Cray, told investors that Cray was already a significant part of Seagate’s ClusterStor revenues, so the added revenue that Cray would get from the transaction will come mostly from resellers. But the more substantial benefit to Cray’s bottom line, according to Henry, is due to improved gross margins, split roughly 50-50 between Cray and third-party resellers.

Cray, with new market vistas in mind, is intent on broadening its portfolio and reach. They’ve put their technology into a public cloud offering via a partnership with the Markley Group. And they’ve formed an impressive (according to IDC/Hyperion) security partnership with Deloitte. Now Cray is further investing into high-performance storage, generally held as the healthiest growth sector in the HPC market.