Inside IT Storage

SSS, LSI and Seagate: a new path to market for SSD

Pete Steege — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:09:45 +0000

LSI and Seagate announced a joint effort to bring Solid State Storage (SSS) to market via an LSI-branded PCI Express board-level solution. Seagate brings the storage, LSI the controller technology, all wrapped in a SAS package that makes it compatible with the future of data center and cloud infrastructures.

There are certainly opportunities to fill hard drive slots with Seagate’s 2.5″ Pulsar SSD product. But LSI and Seagate are demonstrating that they can think “out of the box” when it comes to implementing SSDs.

Secure data disposal is no longer a nice-to-have

Pete Steege — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:20:20 +0000

Data has become the most valued (and proprietary) asset for most businesses. So why do they dispose of it with less discretion than consumers apply to their electric bill?

Granted, IT departments can’t just put their old disk drives through a paper shredder. But there are now simple and incredibly effective encryption methods to guarantee that no one can see what was on all of those old hard drives.

George Crump points out that these solutions are now available on even the most high-performing and sensitive applications in the datacenter.

He also points out that secure data disposal is becoming a mandated requirement – it’s no longer a nice-to-have.

Seagate is proud to be a leader in this area with a full line of self-encryption drives. There’s a secure version of almost every enterprise drive in Seagate’s portfolio.

Fully secure disposal of IT equipment is now a reality.

216TB of Data Dedupe from GreenBytes

Barbara Craig — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:19:48 +0000

What a breath of fresh air (with a small carbon footprint) GreenBytes is with their GB-X series appliances.

Designed for businesses who source their storage products through resellers and channel integrators, they offer scaleable storage (up to 216TB) that fits in shrinking spaces (due to their use of 2.5-inch drives) and does so while keeping the electrical bill at a minimum. Check out this emerging vendor and their data dedupe solutions. No wonder data deduplication has made it’s way on to Storage Magazine’s Hot Storage Technologies for 2010 and even has Gartner and others in the industry raving about how it can offer Data Centers increased data integrity while reducing data protection costs for primary and secondary storage. It’s great to see that businesses of all sizes can now take advantage of the benefits that data deduplication offer with GreenBytes.

SAS gains steam with Dell PowerVault

Pete Steege — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:11:17 +0000

Chris Mellor points to Dell’s adoption of 6Gb/s SAS for their PowerVault DAS line up. Yet another data point that puts SAS front and center in the enterprise.

Why is this such a big deal? Dell effectively doubles their speed with SAS, allowing their storage to keep up with Intel Nehalem and virtualization workloads.

Seagate’s all in for SAS, with the only complete line up of 6Gb/s SAS-enabled hard drives. SAS from top to bottom.

Five ways to shrink the data center

Pete Steege — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:41:44 +0000

Ask an IT manager if his data center is growing, and he should say, “It depends.”

If you’re asking about data capacity and processing power, the answer will almost certainly be yes. Rapid data growth of 50%+ per year is not uncommon.

If you’re asking about the physical size of the data center, it’s very possible he will say no. Real-estate and energy costs are motivating companies to shrink their data centers. Power limits from utilities in some cases mean they don’t have a choice.

A ComputerWorld/IDC data center study found that 29% of IT managers in large companies will consolidate their data centers to use less space.

John Edwards lists 5 ways to get small in the data center in this ComputerWord article:

Adopt virtualization.
Use space-saving hardware.
Look for devices that can handle two or more jobs.
Keep it simple by consolidating wherever possible.
Don’t leave extra hardware lying around.

Storage is a prime candidate for #2. The newest 2.5″ enterprise drives (like Seagate Savvio and Constellation drives) are rapidly replacing traditional 3.5″ drives, driving big reductions in both power and real estate.

The SAS 6Gb/s ecosystem is here. Where are you?

Pete Steege — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:49:14 +0000

Let’s see, for 6Gb/s SAS to work in the real world, we’ll need drives, controllers, enclosures, ready-to-use solutions…

Check, check and check. SAS 6Gb/s is ready for mainstream adoption.

Are you ready too, or still on the sidelines?

SSD Top Performance and Reliability for Enterprise Tier 0

Barbara Craig — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:02:12 +0000

With today’s announcement of Seagate’s Pulsar SSD product, Enterprise customers now have a viable solution for I/O-intensive, high performance blade and general application server storage environments.

Whether it’s I/O intensive workloads like decision support applications (e.g. data warehousing, data mining, email etc.) or traditional business processing in the form of OLTP, ERP or CRM or other I/O intensive workloads (e.g. web, high performance computing (HPC) etc), Pulsar is enterprise-ready to fit the bill for those high speed random-I/O operations – in fact - at 100 times improvement over traditional hard drives. (And who doesn’t like to drive fast!)

Get a look under the covers with Pete Steege.

This is just the first product in a line of high performance SSDs coming down the pike from Seagate. Watch this space for future developments.

Self-Encrypting Drives Save Time, Money and Face too!

Barbara Craig — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:22:03 +0000

As gold hit its’ record high of $1,226.10 an ounce this week, it’s one of the safest investments out there … as is the data security offered with Self-Encrypted Drive (SED) technology.

There are two clear-cut reasons to configure your enterprise data center servers and storage arrays with SED technology. Both can save you valuable time and money and who doesn’t need help in these areas.

First, there’s the “Instant Secure Erase” functionality which cryptographically erases a drive, whether it’s 73GB or 2TB — in less than a second … saving you time and ensuring secure drive return, disposal, or reuse … saving you money.

Second, there is the “Auto-Lock” functionality which automatically locks the drive and secures the data the moment a drive is removed from a system or a system is misplaced or stolen saving face for both you and your organization. And to top it off, SED is government-grade security meaning it’s safe enough for national security yet easy enough for the standalone IT shop to implement. Just add an LSI MegaRAID controller or Intel-based SED-enabled controller to your system and a Seagate Enterprise-based SED drive and you’re good as gold!

6Gb/s SAS drives are a worthy complement to SSD

Pete Steege — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:58:26 +0000

SSD is emerging as a viable option for some enterprise applications, but it will be awhile before it is mature enough for the most critical applications. Until then, data centers will do just fine with the newest crop of 6Gb/s SAS drives.

Computer Power User reviewed the field and saw a lot to like in the leader of the pack, the Seagate Cheetah 15K.7:

“As reliable a high-capacity server drive as you’re likely to find (not to mention the fastest we’ve seen thus far).”

That capacity is critical, because even after SSD matures into a more viable storage alternative, capacity will never be its strong point. SAS drives and SSD will work together in almost every enterprise application.

Virtualization is a killer app for 6Gb/s SAS

Pete Steege — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:20:23 +0000

InfoStor’s article on 6Gb/s SAS and 8 Gb/s FC is titled “The Need for Speed“. Aptly named, as unlike typical ’speed bumps’, this round of interface speed doubling may be needed right away. And from their interface forecast, it’s clear that SAS will play a much bigger role than FC going forward.

InfoStor Editor-in-Chief Dave Simpson points to server consolidation. Virtualization is driving up physical system size and increasing trunk bandwidth needs.

And the 6Gb/s SAS ecosystem is ready to roll. Once 6 Gb/s architectures are deployed, having 6Gb/sec components to fill the slots is critical.

Drive suppliers stand at the ready. Seagate has launched a full line of 6Gb/s SAS hard drives. There are now 6Gb/s versions of the Cheetah 15K, Savvio 15K, Savio 10K and Constellation drives.