Seagate Revamps Entire Enterprise HDD and SSD Line
SFF HDD at 900GB, SSD at 800GB
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 16, 2011 at 3:42 pmSeagate Technology LLC announced its latest enterprise solutions designed to deliver storage for a range of application environments. These solutions include: two new members of the Pulsar Solid State Drive (SSD) family that deliver the enterprise performance, endurance and reliability; two next-generation Savvio 15K and 10K hard disk drives (HDD) optimized for a balance of performance and capacity; and the latest Constellation ES.2 3TB HDD for pure mass storage needs.
"The surge in storage consumption is being driven not only by the growth of content and use within the enterprise, but also by new applications and devices that directly or indirectly consume enterprise storage," said Kurt Richarz, Seagate EVP of Product Line Management. "Seagate’s new family of enterprise storage solutions meets the diverse storage needs of these high growth application environments, whether it’s fast transactional database servers, bulk storage and archiving, or everything in between."
"When we increase the possibility for storage at any point in the world wide web, we increase the possibility for storage at every point in the world wide web," said John Monroe, a research vice president in Gartner’s Data Center Systems group. "Media tablets and other smart handheld devices will serve to generate an even greater need for enormous amounts of both high-capacity and high-speed storage in the cloud, which will in turn require diverse new breeds of storage building blocks to manage this explosive and complex data growth in more efficient, reliable and cost-effective ways."
Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2
Performance with Enterprise-Class Endurance
The Pulsar.2 SSD is a MLC-enabled (up to 800GB) SSD delivering the price/performance, data integrity, and endurance needed for performance-hungry enterprise applications. Unlike other MLC SSDs that have been designed for consumer applications and lack the robust data integrity and endurance feature set required for enterprise applications, the Pulsar.2 SSD has been designed from the ground up for the enterprise. It has the intelligence to automatically detect and correct a multitude of data errors than can occur during normal drive operations to deliver a high level of enterprise-class data integrity and endurance. By enabling MLC NAND technology for the enterprise, this drive addresses the market concerns on SSD cost and endurance and will enable adoption of SSDs in the enterprise. The Pulsar.2 supports both native 6Gb/s SAS and SATA 6Gb/s interfaces.
The Pulsar XT.2 is a 2.5-inch, SLC-based, native 6Gb/s SAS, up to 400GB enterprise SSD from Seagate. The Pulsar XT.2 SSD delivers consistent performance, data integrity, and drive endurance for the demanding enterprise environments. The Pulsar XT.2 is the fastest drive in the Seagate portfolio, with sustainable random reads at 48K and writes at 22K IOPS and sequential reads at 360MB/sec and writes at 300MB/sec. The Pulsar XT.2 is optimized for complex, mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments.
Over 200 man-years of development went into the 2nd-generation Pulsar SSD products, with enterprise reliability verified by a team with over 1,500 collective years of experience in the storage industry. And with a 0.44% AFR and 2 million hour MTBF rating, the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 provide the storage reliability that enterprise data centers can count on. The Pulsar XT.2 is currently shipping to OEMs. Both the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 will be generally available to the channel beginning Q2 of this year.
"HP continues to see new opportunities for solid state storage technology as customers increase virtual system workloads, needing higher performance while reducing power requirements," said Jim Ganthier, HP Industry Standard Software and Systems vice president of Marketing. "HP continues to look forward to storage technology advances from Seagate including wider SSD enablement across HP systems and workloads."
Savvio 15K.3 and Savvio 10K.5
Greater IT Storage Efficiency
Seagate’s latest-generation Savvio 2.5-inch small form factor enterprise class HDDs are built to deliver performance, reliability, and capacity for tier 1, mission-critical server and storage systems. The 2.5-inch enterprise small form factor has transitioned to becoming the form factor of choice over 3.5-inch, with Savvio drives further maximizing data center capabilities without increasing footprint. By unifying a small form factor size with performance and greater capacity and use of the latest 6Gb SAS interface, Savvio HDDs help provide IT data centers with storage efficiency.
The Savvio 10K.5 delivers the world’s highest capacity in a 2.5-inch mission-critical HDD with up to 900GB, enabling easier and more flexible storage upgrades to create capacity and performance systems. As the only 2.5-inch 10K-rpm drive family to provide four capacity points (900GB, 600GB, 450GB, 300GB) on a single platform, and a choice of 6Gb/s SAS or 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces, the Savvio 10K.5 delivers the scalability and versatility that OEMs, system builders, and end users need.
The Savvio 15K.3 is the highest performing HDD available and is optimized for tier 1 storage applications. With capacities available at 300GB and 146GB, Savvio 15K.3 is well-suited for performance-oriented systems that can remain cost-effective to IT budgets and fit a range of applications.
"Dell is looking forward to launching Seagate’s new Savvio 2.5 inch form factor hard drives. This will enhance our line of servers and storage systems, which are designed for the cost-conscious IT professional who requires a balance of capacity, performance, and reliability," said Michael Mitoma, executive director of Storage Engineering at Dell. "Dell’s range of world-class enterprise server and storage systems using Seagate Savvio HDDs can help drive business needs forward while delivering a great return for our customers’ IT investment."
The Savvio 10K.5 and Savvio 15K.3 both deliver a record reliability rating of .44% AFR/2 million hours MTBF and include a 5-year warranty. They also feature Protection Information for enhanced data integrity and a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option for the protection of data-at-rest. Both Savvio models are currently shipping to OEMs, with channel availability for Savvio 10K.5 beginning Q1 and Savvio 15K.3 to follow in Q2.
Constellation ES.2 – Highest Capacity Enterprise Drive
The new Constellation ES.2 HDD packs the highest capacity into an enterprise-class drive, providing the efficiencies demanded by capacity-intensive 24/7 applications, making it ideal for low cost-per-GB highly-valued business storage solutions. With massive 3TB capacities, the Constellation ES.2 HDD powers both server and bulk storage solutions, maximizing the storage footprint by supporting up to 114TB per square foot.
Constellation ES.2 also introduces a new Seagate RAID Rebuild feature for enterprise HDDs. With large capacity drives comes longer RAID recovery times, but with the new Seagate RAID Rebuild development platform, customers can significantly reduce hours of lost productivity during RAID recoveries.
The Constellation ES.2 HDD leverages Seagate’s expertise in enterprise technology by delivering the highest capacity, fifth-generation 3.5-inch drive at the lowest operating power, helping to maximize energy efficiency in the data center. Building on Seagate’s enterprise leadership with its 3rd generation SAS interface, the Constellation ES.2 also features the SAS-based Protection Information feature for end-to-end data protection, Self-Encrypted Drive (SED) option for protecting data-at-rest, best-in-class Rotational Vibration Feed Forward (RVFF) technology that sustains performance when placed in closely-packed multi-drive system environments, and PowerChoice on-demand low power options that keeps drives and systems running cool.
"SGI’s customers require systems that can deliver a combination of high I/O performance and highly reliable, dense storage for their technical computing and archive solutions," said Jose Reinoso, vice president of Storage Engineering at SGI. "Seagate’s Constellation ES family of HDDs provides this critical combination of storage benefits to maximize our customers’ productivity and helps SGI maintain its leadership in delivering world-class systems."
"Capacity-optimized drives are in high demand with our customer base and this category is among the strongest growth and revenue areas for our business," said Steve Ichinaga, senior vice president and general manager of Systems Integration Division at SYNNEX. "Seagate’s 3TB Constellation ES will expand our customers’ ability to deliver greater value storage for a number of expanded opportunities, including systems built for growing nearline storage and cloud environments."
The Constellation ES.2 is offered in both 6Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) and 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces. It is currently shipping to OEMs and will be available in the channel Q2 this year.
Comments
Here Seagate had completely updated its enterprise device lines - HDDs as well as SSDs - with a total of 15 new different capacity models and is not going to lose its long-time comfortable leadership in high-end magnetic disk drives against the new WD/Hitachi GST in the next future.
All Seagate's flash disks are packed in the same 2.5-inch form factor with Samsung's chips. The specs of the new SSD Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 SSDs are excellent and apparently using Seagate's own controller - not SandForce -. The first SSD from the company, revealed in 2009, was an SLC unit up to 200GB at 240/200MB/s R/W with SATA-II only. The MLC Pulsar.2, at 100, 200, 400 or 800GB, supports both 6Gb SATA and SAS interfaces but the company has not revealed an important spec: the transfer rate. It was sequentially R/W 240/200MB/s for the Pulsar 1.
Containing more expansive SLC chips, the SLC Pulsar XT.2, with 6Gb SAS, is at 100, 200 or 400GB, and with impressive speeds for IO/s (48,000/22,000 sustainable random R/W) and sequential transfer rates (360/300MB/s R/W). Seagate did a good job to reassure the users on the reliability of these new flash disks, but strangely with an announced 2-year limited warranty inferior to the 5 million figure for the former Pulsar generation - but it's 5 million on the complete PDF data sheet of the XT.2... You can get more speed and capacity with SSDs on PCIe cards - like products from Fusion-io -, but Seagate is not involved in this market. Just a remark here: in the press release, the newly-announced SSDs are listed in the first place, before HDDs. But everybody knows that the firm is selling tons of enterprise disk drives, flash disk being a niche market - like for WD and HGST - with bigger competitors like Stec - with about all the big OEMs - and others. We even learned recently that Seagate was not offering SSDs at all in Europe. HDD makers are hand to hand with big OEMs since an eternity, but these latter prefer other SDD makers: because their products are superior or to avoid to put all their eggs in the same basket?
With the two new enterprise hard disk drives, nobody can compete at all in terms of technology and market share. Both of them are in SFF form factor (2.5-inch, 15mm height) and have optional encryption. The Savvio 10K.5 integrates one disk/two heads to three disks/six heads depending on the capacity, 300 450, 600 or 900GB, with the choice between 6Gb SAS or 4Gb FC interface. Areal density here tops 506Gb per square inch. With 448Gb per square inch, the Savvio 15K.3, at 15,000rpm with 6GB SAS only, contains two (146GB) or four heads (300GB). Looking at the offering of the two rivals of Seagate in SFF drives, Hitachi GST and Toshiba cannot do more than 640GB at 10,000rpm and 147GB at 15,000rpm.
These Savvio are going to kill Seagate's Cheetah NS (10,000rpm) and 18K (15,000rpm), both at a maximum 600GB capacity. That's the end of the 3.5-inch form factor for high-end enterprise drives at more than 7,200rpm. We are waiting since many years for more than 15,000rpm for the rotational speed of disks into an HDD to accelerate the transfer rate and diminish the access time, but it seems actually impossible because the motor will generate too much heat. It explains notably why SSDs have a good chance to replace enterprise HDDs on the long term, the only question being today the difference of price.
Seagate was already shipping 3.5-inch devices at 2TB and 7,200rpm with 6Gb SAS and has formerly launched a SATA unit at 3TB. On the new Constellation ES.2, with 5 disks, the capacity is increased by 50% at 3TB into the SAS drive. What's also interesting here is the new RAID Rebuild feature that reduces the infinite duration to rebuild a disk array when one of the high-capacity HDDs fails. This unit is the highest capacity SAS HDD, on parity with Hitachi GST Ultrastar 7K3000 already launched and to be available "mid-2011" compared to 2Q11 for Seagate.
To better understand the evolution between mechanical and silicon storage products: Seagate increased by 50% the capacity of its SAS 3.5-inch and SFF units in roughly one year. For SSD, it's four times more capacity in 15 months!
Subscribe to our free daily newsletter
