Storage Effect

The world’s biggest drives just got 50% bigger

Though not near as sound-bytable as 1 TB, Seagate’s announcement of the world’s first 1.5 TB drive is big news.  The newest Barracuda  7200.11 adds 500 gigabytes to each drive in one fell swoop. It’s the biggest capacity jump in the history of disk drives. 

Expect to see 1.5 TB and 3 TB solutions start popping up in all those high-capacity hot spots: high end destop PCs, backup drives and home entertainment systems. 

UPDATE: What others are saying:Engadget, ZD Net, Daily Tech, Blocks and Files and PC World.

Next: the exabyte drive

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Seagate is a Top Five technology brand for a surprising number of IT end users

An end user IT survey by Everything Channel on CRN.com shows that disk drives aren’t as much a commodity as one might think. 

When asked what five vendors are most important for their technology provider to have a relationship with, Seagate was mentioned by a surprising number of IT folks.  All the more impressive given that Microsoft, HP and Dell take up 3 of the 5 spots for over 40% of the respondents.

For small businesses, Seagate was mentioned more than EMC, Sun, CA, SAP, Toshiba, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp.  No other pure storage vendor (device or system) was on the list. 

Seagate had an even higher ranking on the list for medium-sized businesses. (more…)

Content comes first, opening up new uses and usefulness

Seagate announced Maxtor CentralAxis today, a really cool New Thing in home storage.  Until now, external storage devices have mostly been storage add-ons for a PC.  Even the NAS devices out there have focused on providing a “PC drive for the home”.  It’s shareable storage, but shackled to the PC model.

CentralAxis puts the content first, rather than the PC.  That opens up uses that until now have been reserved for the techies among us:

• OS-independent content sharing. Content doesn’t have to decide to be Windows or Mac OS X, and can be used by either one.
• File sharing with DLNA-compliant devices like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems.  Easily watch videos and view photos on TV screens instead of a PC.
• Access content directly via the web. CentralAxis allows this with a simple username and password, without going through a PC or compromising a network firewall. 

CentralAxis does all the “home storage” basics as well: 1 TB capacity, centralized backups from PCs on the network, etc.  But it’s the new approach to content that makes it a game changer. 

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?

More room to save all those movies - and your cable company is happy too

Seagate just announced Showcase, add-on storage for DVRs.  This is great news for movie hoarders like you and me, but also a big plus for the service providers.

Think about it: your cable company gives you a set-top DVR free or at a discount with their service.  They’re not motivated to fill it up with lots of capacity that adds cost for them.  Yet HD movies take a lot of room, and more and more consumers want to keep it all.

Showcase will let service providers give their packrat customers what they want - a way to add space to save all those HD TV shows and movies - without adding terabytes of storage as a fixed cost for every customer.

Whatever the media, storage marches on

Here’s a fun read from Maximum PC: David Murphy’s interview of Seagate’s Bill Watkins.   He tells it like it is - which is a refreshing change from your average CEO.  Bill covers a lot of ground - worth the time if you’ve got it.

Takeaways for solution providers

• 1 TB sounds like a lot of storage, but it’s no larger than 5 MB was in 1979.  Like then, people will surprise themselves with how easily they fill it up.
• Your biggest storage opportunity is helping your customers use all of their data - not just what’s on their PC. 
• Your customers don’t care if it’s flash or disk or optical or green goo from Mars - they want storage that works for them.  Don’t get distracted. 
• DVDs and CDs are dinosaurs.  Electronic distribution is the new species, and demands lots of storage to enable it.

Answer the question “How much storage do you need?”

Seagate has a simple tool on seagate.com (under Useful Links on this page) that helps you figure out how much storage you or your customers need for desktop PCs, notebooks and home servers.  Plug in your content usage, and out pops some recommendations. 

Give it a try and report back on how much storage YOU need.  Also, any feedback on the tool?  What could make it more useful?

Storage performance specs are so last millenium  

Going by today’s headlines, storage vendors should add a new spec to their data sheets: hackability.

Case in point: yet another theft of reams of customer data, this time in the UK.  Tapes left in a car.

Wired Magazine’s Fetish spread features the Maxtor BlackArmor drive from Seagate.   This is a new kind of extreme storage device.  It’s virtually unhackackable, offering AES encryption encased within the hard drive itself.  So if it gets stolen or lost (does it matter which?), you can sleep secure in the fact that someone else may have your drive, but they don’t have your data.

It’s got a high “eye candy” factor, too - so you can be safe AND cool.

Update: CDW is taking orders for BlackArmor now.

Even best-in-class rebuild times expose data to hours of risk

Blocks and Files points to an Demartek study (sponsored by Pillar) showing that the Pillar Axiom 500 rebuild times are much shorter on high capacity arrays that similar EMC or NetApp systems.

The glaring data beyond Pillar’s performance, though, is the teeth-clenchingly long times that data is one drive failure away from catastrophic loss in every case. 

The tests were conducted with about 50 500GB drives per system using RAID 5 (RAID 4 for NetApp), meaning the arrays can be rebuilt if one drive fails, but not two.  So during the rebuilds of from 3 to 23 hours, if another drive fails, all data is lost. 

Insert 1 TB drives into the equation, and your rebuild time (and vulnerability) doubles.

RAID 6 and other dual-failure protective schemes make this problem go away, but cost a little in capacity. 

How are you dealing with this?  I’ve heard that RAID 6 is gaining traction for 7200 rpm high capacity enterprise drives like Seagate’s Barracuda ES that are less reliable than 15K SAS enterprise drives (see Seagate’s 3.5″ Cheetah and 2.5″ Savvio for reference). 

Does your RAID vary by drive class?  What other magic do you apply to make this work?

Widespread video consumption will bring the next billion within five years 

It’s a proud day for Seagate. 

Today the company announced it has shipped its one billionth disk drive. There’s a fun video stroll through the 29 years of Seagate’s existence on the website.  I was in high school for drive #1- it seems like just yesterday!

More amazing: the 2 billionth drive will ship within 5 years.  How can that be, given how capacious drives are today? 

One word: video.  There are several interlocking trends driving the sustained explosion in content needing to be stored in our world, but video rises above all else in explaining it.  I posted on this not too long ago.

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Digital Rights Management requires rock-solid data security in the infrastructure

Atrato’s been making waves with their innovative approach to performance for content serving applications.  Now they’ve announced that they are working with Seagate to add full disk encryption (FDE) to provide compelling data security to the solution. 

Secure data is a clear need for customers in the business of content distribution.  Their product is basically bits and bytes.  Without bullet-proof security, these guys risk a “pay if you want to” message to this developing market. 

The rules of engagement for Digital Rights Management are still taking shape.  Atrato’s capabilities will be a valuable tool for those trying to influence the future to carve out a profitable and sustainable business model in this space.

Comments?  Is this a killer product for media companies or just interesting technology?