According to a statement released late Tuesday by Milpitas, Calif.-based Adaptec Inc., the deal involves both products and intellectual property currently used by IBM inside its server line. A spokeswoman for Adaptec said the deal involves the acquisition of IBM's engineering team, plus components and adapters.

The undisclosed number of engineers will join Adaptec's own engineering ranks, designing new RAID components that will be added to Adaptec's merchant product line. The RAID components that the IBM engineers designed were used internally, shipping inside IBM's iSeries and pSeries line of eServers.

In return, Adaptec will become IBM's sole supplier of the RAID components, an agreement that will last for three years.

The deal seems like a win for Adaptec, which will be able to sell a previously proprietary component line on the open market. Adaptec sells a variety of RAID cards and host-based adapters to a variety of server manufacturers, and the IBM engineers' expertise will be put toward enhancing that capability. Adaptec already provided data protection solutions for the xSeries line, the company said.

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"Our strategic relationship with IBM has been a successful one, and we are pleased to expand our collaboration even further to deliver next-generation RAID data-protection solutions for xSeries, iSeries and pSeries customers with diverse business needs," Robert N. Stephens, president and CEO of Adaptec, said in a statement.

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"The new agreements enhance the Adaptec suite of storage solutions and extend our ability to serve diverse applications, such as enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, customer relationship management and transaction processing."

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Adaptec said it expects to generate $150 million in new revenue over the next three years from the agreement. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the company said it will provide more detail during its quarterly earnings call July 29.

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Editor's Note: A day after an Adaptec spokeswoman said that the IBM-Adaptec deal involved just a transfer of IP and engineers, Adaptec officials said the deal also involves the transfer of products.