Rorke Data uses Seagate Enterprise drives in their RAID, SAN & Archive solutions. Their customers rely on the performance of Pulsar SSDs and Savvio HDDs along with the large capacities they require with the Constellation ES family of capacity-optimized hard drives.
Learn more about Rorke Data – watch this video.

Read more about the successful partnership here.

He was of course referencing the great annual study conducted by IDC and sponsored by EMC, after which he went on to explain how this will relate to SSD use. SSDs will certainly complement system architectures in the overall hierarchy, but Janukowicz further lays the foundation of just how and where that will occur.

And what about the vendor trends around SSD that will help fuel further growth and adoption? Joseph Kovar took on this topic by discussing not only Single-Level Cell (SLC) vs. Multi-Level Cell (MLC) technology in SSDs, but also how the software and controller technology has changed. For example, Kovar noted that many applications now can be made aware of SSDs and therefore take advantage of specific benefits in their use.

At the device level, SSDs have advanced greatly, and work from organizations including the Storage Performance Council and JEDEC have significantly helped with the process of endurance and performance standardization. This is just one area that Rich Vignes of Seagate covered. He also discussed the differences between enterprise and client-class SSDs, from which the ChannelCast itself was titled.

Interested in knowing more? Although the live event is now over, the ChannelCast presentation is now available to view here. Simply register and then you’ll be sent to the download page. I must say it was refreshing to listen in and view the presentation from these industry experts. And I also came away from it with a much better understanding of what we can expect within the enterprise in the year ahead and beyond. I hope you do as well!

After viewing the presentation, let us know what questions or thoughts you have. Do your experiences differ from the presenters? You can post here or at our Facebook page.

Moving on to “where and how” to store your data, it’s a good idea to rate the application usage within your organization. Here are some general guidelines that may prove useful.
HOT DATA: Up until last year, hot data was typically stored on Tier 1 hard disk drives – namely 10K and 15K-RPM spinning media. Today, some of the hottest of that hot data (Tier 0) has been moved to an SSD (Solid State Disk) for instantaneous access.
WARM DATA: When its data that needs to be read and/or written to often and is critically important to the organization, this Tier 1 data is often stored on mainstream 10K and 15K-RPM hard drives. Much more affordable than SSDs, these drives offer the highest form of reliable, consistent performance for high demand applications.
COOL DATA: The biggest pool of data is stored in Tier 2 primarily because of its cost-efficiency. Offering high capacity storage at the most economical $/GB, this is where the data that must be readily available on-line yet is not critically vital to the organization today is stored.
COLD DATA: Data at rest or archived data has traditionally been stored on tape. As the cost of hard drives has declined and the blurring between on-line and off-line access requirements has occurred, some data centers are opting for using high capacity, low power hard drives for their cold storage requirements.

And now for the “when”. Obviously, data storage is a constant and essential component for successful businesses today and data growth is expanding exponentially year upon year. In fact, staying ahead of the storage demand can be an exhaustive and painful effort. But as we know, what’s hot today probably won’t be hot tomorrow, so storage tiering allows you to move data easily between these tiers making you as efficient as possible. Auto Storage Tiering (AST) will make your life easier. Storage magazine’s recent “Storage Purchasing Intentions Survey” found 27% of data storage managers currently use automated storage tiering (AST) and another 32% will evaluate the technology.

Read more about the tiered storage from Ashish Nadkarni of Taneja Group’s podcast or Randy Kerns of Search Storage blog or read IDC’s paper on tiering.

Are you tiering your storage today?  If so, how many tiers of storage do you have? And if not, what’s holding you back?

Perhaps the largest global cloud opportunities are going to come from China. According to this recent story at Technorati, there are plans to build a 7,800 square meter complex and dub it “Cloud Valley,” and it also happens to be a spot where more than 1,000 orders have already been made for cloud servers. In the same story, research firm IDC estimated that China can expect 30% growth in its cloud market this year alone.

Seagate's Wes Perdue speaks at the 2011 International Cloud Computing Seminar

Seagate recognized the opportunity in the region, and recently partnered with key organizations including the Chinese Institute of Communications (CIC) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), to co-sponsor a forum on Cloud Computing in Beijing last month. The goal was to bring key think tanks, researchers, ministry officials and academic institutions  together to discuss and learn about cloud computing and storage needs moving ahead.

The forum, called the International Cloud Computing Seminar (ICCS), brought presenters from Seagate including Wes Perdue, product line manager for cloud computing strategy, as well as participants from Google, Microsoft, Dell, and many others. During his presentation, Wes discussed cloud use trends as well as offering insight into how cloud systems are best deployed.

The feedback from the ICCS participants and attendees after the event was that it was a success, and it was the collaborative nature of the event and the ideas generated that made it so.

As the cloud infrastructure continues to develop and grow in other nations across the globe, having similar forums for engaging discussion and debate could prove to be valuable. Ultimately it’s all about answering the question of how the deployment of these global cloud data centers can be made as useful and efficient as possible for the world’s data.

Having a client-device that offers SSD-like performance along with higher capacity means that when we think about enterprise storage on a macro level, the demands on servers and storage systems and the cloud will increase as well. Ultimately more efficient and speedy client systems will mean more transaction requests can potentially be made to servers and systems on the backend.

So what does the future hold for the enterprise to handle these storage demands? Maybe it’s more SSDs to handle the performance task demands, or more HDDs to take on the capacity?

How about using enterprise-class SSHDs that again can blend the best of both areas just like they do in client applications? They can be situated at Tier 1 in between the hottest transactional data run on SSDs, and the lower tiers of bulk or infrequently accessed data stored on HDDs.

The nice thing about this mix is that the majority of storage work today is handled in Tier 1 which is the workhorse of a storage system according to IDC. It’s also an area where performance is always looking to be increased, often by short-stroking and over-provisioning. Seems bumping up this tier with enterprise-class SSHDs makes sense.

So just when can we look forward to other areas such as the enterprise turning to SSHDs? Earlier this year our CEO Steve Luczo offered a clue. “My perspective is that in 5 years – if the Silicon guys can stay on the cost curvature – 80% of our drives will be hybrid drives,” he said.

And if the adoption of hybrid drives on the client side continues to grow, we could certainly use those SSHD enterprise drives as well. Brooke Crothers of CNET recently reported that if Ultrabook vendors (which included current vendors Acer and Asus, as well as Hewlett-Packard and Dell identified as future players), “…want to hit sub-$1,000 price points next year, hybrid drives may be an imperative.”

And now CTOEdge has recently published, “Six Steps for Making MLC Work in the Enterprise”, an extensive piece that updates and expands on these areas. Written by Seagate’s Teresa Worth, the story presents a unique inside-perspective on the obstacles surrounding SSD adoption, provides an update on standards body works, and shares ways to simplify SSD adoption and deployment.

IT pros are always looking for ways to improve the performance of their storage infrastructure as their data-intensive applications needs grow. SSDs show promise to fulfill these needs, but still also have their range of challenges for deployment. And certainly MLC technology, as Worth adds in her story, can help successfully incorporate SSDs into data centers without breaking the bank.

Check out the CTOEdge piece about the methods and best practices for deployment and do let us know your thoughts.

Have you deployed SSDs at your business or are you still waiting? What issues have you experienced or what concerns do you have?

Seagate will be there participating in a number of speaking sessions on the topics of security/encryption and interfaces. Check out the topics below and be sure to also check out the full conference agenda here.

Wednesday, October 12, 10:15 a.m.

SNIA Tutorial: SAS and SATA Combine to Change the Storage Market
Marty Czekalski, Senior Interface and Programs Manager, Seagate Technology LLC
Harry Mason, Director of Industry Marketing, Storage Components Group, LSI

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) has become the backbone of enterprise storage deployments. Functioning as both a device level interface and a tiered storage interconnect, SAS has preserved the usability and cost-effectiveness of the SCSI architecture while rapidly evolving by adding new features, capabilities and performance enhancements. The combined legacy and evolution of SAS makes it possible to realize extremely high throughput with standard high-volume components while extending to new technologies of the customer’s choice and allows systems to be built that accommodate large numbers of either SAS and/or SATA hard disk drives. Intended for OEM, System Builders and End-Users, this tutorial describes the capabilities of the SAS interface, how it’s designed to interoperate with SATA drives, and when combined, how these technologies can be combined to deliver some very compelling storage solutions.

The presenters will take a look at the evolution of SAS, how it has expanded beyond traditional DAS usage, discuss the significance of 6Gb/s SAS to SSDs, examine the effect of SAS on bandwidth aggregation and show a detailed comparison of connector types. To keep attendees current on the most recent technology developments, the tutorial will also provide an up-to-the-minute recap of the latest additions to the SAS standard and roadmaps. It will detail applications and storage deployments requiring Non-volatile memory, faster RAID performance, and enhanced connectivity. The discussion will include an update on the status of 12Gb/s SAS development/standardization efforts, demonstrating how SAS continues to innovate and ultimately protect Enterprise storage investments.

Wednesday, October 12, 2:15 p.m.

Industry Perspective: Panel Discussion: Deciphering NVM Interface Alternatives – What You Need to Know Before Selecting

Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager, Solid State Drives & HDD Components, IDC
Marty Czekalski, Senior Interface and Programs Manager, Seagate Technology LLC
Jimmy Daley, Director, Smart Storage, HP
Gary Kotzur, Director/Distinguished Engineer, NGCS Storage Advanced Engineering, Dell
Harry Mason, Director of Industry Marketing, Storage Components Group, LSI
James E. Myers, Applications Engineering Manager , Intel

The industry is wrestling with critical questions about the best way to reap the full performance and reduced TCO benefits presented by solid-state storage. This panel discussion will explore the topic of how best to connect and implement solid-state storage in enterprise environments in the coming years. Options including SAS and PCI will be considered. Decision factors related to performance such as latency, bandwidth, and scalability AND decision factors related to total cost of ownership such as power, solution robustness, serviceability, and sourcing options will be discussed by the expert panel.

Thursday, October 13, 9:25 a.m.

Industry Perspective: Making Data at Rest Encryption Easy For Enterprise Storage Users
David R. Kaiser PMP, Engineering Director, Enterprise Storage Products, Seagate Technology

The importance in protecting data using encryption continues to grow, but so do the challenges. Seagate is setting the standard in data protection using Self-Encrypting Drives (SED), come hear how TCG Enterprise is being implemented to make “encryption everywhere” a reality.

Yes, you read it correctly: 12Gb/s SAS is coming. According to Marty Czekalski, vice president, SCSI Trade Association and Emerging Architecture program manager, Seagate Technology, the first industry 12Gb/s SAS plug-fests to publicly test compatibility and interoperability between vendors will begin by the middle of 2012.

And that’s great news not only for the industry manufacturers, but also for IT pros that are in need of increasing their storage bandwidth. With numerous research data showing growing storage consumption in virtually every area of storage, 12Gb/s SAS is very much needed. Not only will it help meet the storage demands of I/O-intensive applications, but it will benefit those growing cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments as well.

Stay tuned to this blog as we’ll continue to report on 12Gb/s SAS progress as the technology continues to develop.

This movement also tends to reflect different levels of capacity. As the data becomes less-frequently accessed, the nearline drives handle and store this bulk data naturally through their larger capacities. For a typical business that sells a product or service to a customer, order processing could be handled on the highest-performing tier. But then after a given period of time, say three to six months, those now older order records can be moved to the nearline drives. For some businesses, using a tiered system that uses three levels of storage makes more sense than two tiers. A tiered system built around Seagate drives could mean use of Pulsar SSDs at the top tier, then 15K Cheetah or Savvio SAS drives in the second tier, and finally 7,200-rpm Constellation drives.

Tiered systems that automatically move information based on their use have emerged, and these software systems are available from EMC, HP, Dell, IBM and others to use with their own servers. Auto-tiering looks at the data and then moves it based on use patterns, enabling the IT manager to focus on other areas in the data center.

But even with auto-tiering’s convenience, some IT professionals may not yet be ready to relinquish control to a software application in an area that can impact performance and data center efficiency. Manually moving data from tiers over time does give the IT manager direct control over exactly what is moved and when. And an automatic tiered solution may not match the needs of all businesses, especially if it is a cyclical or unpredictable one where hot data that becomes cold may then become hot again.

Automatic tiering of data is a great option — but can it be made to fit the needs of all businesses over time? Or even if it could, will their always be a group of IT professionals who will want to more closely evaluate their data, and tier manually? What do you think – would you be willing to let the system automate your data tiering?