If storage isn’t a big enough part of your work life, how about bringing it home for the Holidays?
This enterprising chap turned 70 old SCSI disk drives into a one terabyte tannenbaum.
If he had used today’s latest small form factor enterprise SAS drives (like the 300GB Seagate Savvio), he would have would have had 21 terabytes to string with tinsel.
Something to plan for next year, Philip?
Happy Holidays to Storage Effect readers wherever you are. I wish you the very best in 2009.
Categories: Random
Tagged: 1 TB, Christmas tree, disk drives, Pete Steege, SAS, SCSI, storage effect
75% less power and 70% less space than 3.5″ drives
HP’s making the move to 300GB 2.5″ SAS drives. The Seagate-built drive is twice the capacity of previous 2.5″ SAS drives. HP began shipping the Savvio 10K 300GB SAS drive worldwide to resellers this week.
This is another step in the rapid enterprise storage form factor transition underway. 2.5″ is mainstream for datacenters starting now.
Categories: Business Solutions · Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: 2.5", 300GB, disk drive, HP, Pete Steege, SAS, Savvio, Seagate, storage, storage effect
Enterprise SAS drives are today’s best choice for most IT shops
The smart guys at Tom’s Hardware have done a yeoman’s job of sorting the facts from the fiction regarding SSDs for the enterprise. Their conclusions:
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Products
Tagged: Cheetah 15K, enterprise, Flash, hard drive, Hitachi UltraStar, review, SAS, SSD, Tom's Hardware
Seagate and SAS/SATA flexibility get the nod for their Big Guns of Business platform
When it comes to storage, Tom’s Hardware gets it.
It’s not because they chose Seagate’s Cheetah 15K SAS and Barracuda ES SATA drives for their Big Guns of Business workstation platform. It’s that they understand the truly revolutionary benefits of SAS and SATA in combination.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is taking workstations (and servers, and storage systems) where SCSI never could because of native mix-and-match compatibility with SATA.
That means you can have screamin’ SAS, massive SATA, or both. And change it up tomorrow if you want.
More and more system vendors are getting this. Strongly consider SAS-based systems from here on out.
Categories: Business Solutions · Products
Tagged: 15K, Barracuda ES, Cheetah, SAS, SATA, SCSI, Tom's Hardware
SAS drives are thriving outside the data center, despite SATA’s cost advantage
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was created to replace SCSI, the long-standing enterprise hard drive interface. It has done that, but there have been sightings far from the datacenter. Places like Ravelry, a seemingly home-hosted knitting website:
Rather than shrink in the face of lower priced SATA drives, SAS drives are expanding into SATA’s domain. What’s going on here?
If you’re still stuck in a SCSI/SATA mindset, consider a crash course on SAS.
Who’s replaced SATA or IDE with SAS recently?
Categories: Business Solutions · Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: 1 TB, 2.5", 450 GB, Barracuda ES, Cheetah 15K, Ravelry, SAS, SATA
SAS drives get bigger and smaller to take share from SATA for business applications
IDC data from InfoStor shows this year and next are the golden age of SATA drives in the enterprise.
It’s not that the trend for high capacity storage abates in the future; it’s that SAS drives are expanding their capabilities to replace SATA in many applications.
Why settle for an interface originally designed for PCs if you can get the same thing in SAS for a little bit more?
SATA drives won’t go away of course – they still provide the most capacity for the dollar. If it’s good enough for an application, people will continue to use it.
Have you made the jump to SAS? Why or why not?
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Random · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: 1 TB, 2.5", Barracuda ES, IDC, InfoStor, SAS, SATA, Savvio
Becomes the first major supplier to offer a 2.5″ SAS storage system
Dell uncharacteristically took the role of technology leader and launched the MD1120, a direct-attach storage system with 2.5″ SAS drives for their PowerEdge servers (thanks Blocks and Files). It’s likely that their major competitors (and others) will follow with their own announcements in the near future.
Why 2.5″ SAS?
Make no mistake – they may be small, but they are the cream of the crop. Fastest (for 10K rpm), most reliable, highest data integrity. Oh – and they use less space and a lot less power than 3.5″ drives.
Don’t confuse 2.5″ SAS drives with notebook drives. They’re similar in size, but that’s about the only thing they have in common.
The beginning of the end for 3.5″ enterprise drives
The only fatal flaw for 2.5″ and storage has been capacity. These drives are already the standard for servers, but storage system makers couldn’t make the numbers work with only 147GB per drive.
It looks like 300GB may be the tipping point. Seagate recently launched the first 300GB 2.5″ SAS drive, the Savvio 10K.3.
What’s your 2.5″ storage plan? Is it time?
Categories: Products · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: 10K, 2.5", DAS, Dell, MD1120, PowerEdge, SAS, Savvio, Seagate
Higher performance and redundancy for high-capacity SAS architectures
Web 2.0 storage applications have been a boon to high capacity server-class SATA drives like Seagate’s Barracuda ES. But 7200 rpm SATA will only take you so far. Enterprise-class 15K rpm SAS drives are incredibly robust and full-featured, and priced like it. Shouldn’t there be something in between?
Now there is. Seagate has added a SAS drive to the Barracuda ES family. It costs a little more than the SATA version, but gives back dual ports and more than twice the performance in some applications, along with the 1 TB capacity.
Conventional wisdom is that performance is determined by spin speed. Don’t overlook the power of SAS to jack up the speed of your high-capacity applications.
Categories: Products · Random · Storage Systems
Tagged: 1 TB, Barracuda ES, SAS, SATA, Seagate
Common-sense storage innovations slash storage energy use
Xyratex has taken a second step into the lower-power storage arena with the OneStor SP1224s that uses 2.5″ SAS drives. In February they added software to their RAID platform that allows OEMs to selectively spin down drives not in use.
Lisa Hart at Xyratex says “This is like having a light switch on your wall.” Exactly! Everyone understands that leaving lights on in an empty room is a waste. Storage is not so different:
Expect to see more vendors applying smart power management at all leveles to make a big dent in data center Watts per terabyte (or petabyte!).
Comments please: who’s using MAID, PowerTrim or 2.5″ SAS today? Who’s planning to?
Categories: Random
Tagged: Barracuda ES, Cheetah, green, MAID, power, SAS, Savvio, SP1224s, Xyatex
2.5″ enterprise drives reduce storage system power
Conventional wisdom is that 2.5″ enterprise drives are great for servers, but need more capacity to be viable in storage systems. Problem is, conventional wisdom didn’t account for the vast quantities of these systems packed into an internet data center.
Mario Apicella, InfoWorld’s Storage Advisor, takes a look at Infortrend’s B12 storage system and says the future is now for 2.5″ SAS drives.
Why? Less real estate, obviously. But also much lower power for the same performance: 2.6 Watts less per drive than same-capacity 3.5″ drives. And dramatically less weight to ship, move around and pile on floors.
Re-engineering current systems for smaller-format drives is the easiest, most effective way to make storage more energy friendly.
Here’s more info on the Savvio 2.5″ 15K SAS drive Mario referred to in his post.
Who’s using 2.5″ SAS today? Servers and/or storage. What’s your experience?
Categories: Products · Random · Storage Systems
Tagged: 15K, 2.5", EonStor, Infortrend, InfoWorld, Mario Apicella, SAS, Savvio, Storage Advisor
