The Storage Effect

Seagate blogs – week in review

Mark Wojtasiak — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:03:44 +0000

Check out what Seagate bloggers had to talk about this past week:

Storage Effect

Test Freak freak over Barracuda XT
Cache is king but the masses still rule
Y2.011K looming for Windows XP users
Avatar still wins best picture

Inside IT Storage

Storage Review “looks under the covers” of the Seagate Constellation ES
Rorke Data & Seagate Rock the Media & Entertainment World

Test Freaks freak over Barracuda XT

Mark Wojtasiak — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:10:48 +0000

Test Freaks took a look at the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive…check it out

10 out of 10 plus an Editor’s Choice.

“The new Seagate Barracuda XT though is a different story, this drive is fast, probably the fastest 7200RPM drive on the market today and I’m sure it will give the 10K RPM drives a run for their money as well….The new Seagate Barracuda XT drive is well worth it I think, if you’re looking for a large capacity, fast hard drive then this is the one you’ll want to get.”

Cache is king, but the masses still rule.

Mark Wojtasiak — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:22:58 +0000

Enterprise SSD has its place, and undoubtedly one place is caching. LSI seems to think so given their recent announcement around FastPath and CacheCade software enhancements to their MegaRAID line of 6Gb SATA/SAS controllers.

LSI’s says the new offerings “help to optimize application performance in direct-attached storage environments configured with solid-state drives“… and “enables SSDs to be configured as a secondary tier of cache to maximize transactional I/O performance to deliver up to a 50X performance improvement in read-intensive applications.”

What read intensive applications:

On-line transaction processing (OLTP) perhaps eCommerce applications
File servers used for compute intensive database applications seen in finance and banking.
Web servers perhaps with the exponential growth of on-demand online video.

What does LSI’s software really do? “The solution is designed to accelerate the I/O performance of HDD-based arrays while minimizing required investments in SSD technology.”

Okay…so it gives your traditional hard drive based storage more power while making your initial investment in SSD more cost effective. Sounds political… no need to make dramatic changes to policy, just economically sensible tweaks to please the masses (the independents).

Long live the hybrid model… it always seems to work out best.

Check out everything SSD on Storage Effect

Y2.011K looming for Windows XP users

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:51:39 +0000

The industry is a buzz over the impact of hard drive manufacturers transitioning to 4K sectors by January 2011 and it’s impact on users primarily hanging on to Windows XP.

The benefits of moving to 4K sectors:

Higher capacity with more usable disk space
Runway for continued hard drive capacity improvements
Improved data integrity with larger Error Correction (ECC) block sizes

The drawback: Windows XP is not designed to handle 4K sectors and creates drive partition that are not aligned to the 4K format. Furthermore, many popular HDD imaging utilities result in the same problem – unaligned drive partitions, even on Vista or Window 7. Check out a recent BBC article on the subject. Customers wanting to stretch their IT dollar by upgrading Windows XP systems will have to rely on 4K emulation software built into the drive. Basically the drive is able to pretend it’s using 512K block sizes. This works great when hard drive partitions are aligned. But if you encounter and unaligned situation (XP or Utility created) your system could suffer a performance hit. Check out these results. Yikes!

The silver lining: yet another reason for a PC Refresh. As long as you format and partition with Windows Vista (SP 1 or older) or Windows 7, partition align is golden. If you or your customers commonly use other software for drive imaging or partitioning, check with your vendor to make sure it is compatible with 4K drives.

This is a huge evolution in hard drive technology. One that is 30 years in the waiting. Expect hard drive manufacturers like Seagate to spend a lot of time and energy around awareness and education on 4K sectors.

Is this the hard drive industry’s Y2.011K ?

Not likely, but it does make getting a new PC more inviting since I am one of those hangin’ on to Windows XP.

Avatar still wins best picture

Mark Wojtasiak — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:20:39 +0000

Yesterday at the Oscars, The Hurt Locker won best picture and best director. I am sure well deserving, but when it comes to reshaping the future of movie making, one cannot argue with the fact that James Cameron with Avatar will forever change the way movies are made and enjoyed.

Sure, there will always remain a desire for pure movie making: a great script, cinematography, direction, actors, sound and video editing, production. Not everyone enjoys movies of the sci-fi genra…then again who hasn’t seen Avatar? Look at what went into the main visual effects production of Avatar, and the technology deployed by New Zealand’s Weta Digital:

10,000 square foot server farm
4,000 HP servers
35,000 processor cores
Over 1,000 Terabytes of storage (>1 Petabyte)
900 people

Each minute of footage occupied more than 17GB of storage and the sever farm ranked 193 to 197th spots in the world’s top 500 supercomputers, and this is just the main visual effect work. Additional companies like ILM were hired to work on other areas of the movie.

All said, if companies like Seagate, HP. AMD, Intel, and others were part of the Academy…Avatar just may have won best picture.

Keep em coming Mr Cameron.

Check out more details about the making of Avatar here

Pent up demand…45 Terabytes worth

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:30:34 +0000

SearchStorageChannel.com ’s annual IT Spending Survey indicates storage manager will add an average of 45TB per company this year alone. 6TB more than anticipated last year….talk about pent up demand.

Companies with >$1B in revenue a whopping 80TB
Companies with <$100M in revenue 25TB

Looking at these numbers, companies 10x bigger are only 3x bigger in terms of capacity needs. What does this say about where the growth is coming from? Once again, small to medium sized (SMB) companies, and face it, there’s many more of them than the $1B+ companies.

Given the study also indicates that storage budgets will grow roughly 3.2%, that’s a lot of bang for your buck. What are they planning to spend money on? No surprise…

Data Backup
Capacity
Data Recovery

All 3 being “nearline” applications, meaning these guys will be investing much of their dollars in lower performance (7200RPM) higher capacity Tier 2 solutions meant to best address data growth. Looking at the entire picture, the number one priority is to get a grasp on data growth and play catch up from a year of getting by with what you got.

Once under control, you can bet the push for higher performance solutions will begin to surge. Good thing enterprise SSD is on the rise, and the Tier 1 drives keep getting bigger and faster.

The future looks bright for enterprise storage.

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Seagate Barracuda drives get iconic

Mark Wojtasiak — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:47:33 +0000

A hard drive is a hard drives is a hard drive… boring to look at, but oh so important to what we do whether it’s simple external storage, everyday computing, or high performance multimedia and gaming.

Seagate recently took a new approach to hard drive marketing, using iconic imagery and emotion to depict what Barracuda drive does what. I assume this is to better inform customers of what the key differences are between Barracuda LP, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT….visually.

Oh, and there’s that other thing about standing out in a crowd of hard drive images on online reseller sites and advertising.

I think they look pretty cool, and I expect to see more of the same for Seagate’s other drives in the enterprise and notebook segments. For now, Barracuda gives you a taste of what’s to come. You can’t fault Seagate for having a little fun with the products they have been designing, manufacturing, marketing, and selling for 30 years.

What do you think of the look?

HDCCTV spec gives life to legacy surveillance

Mark Wojtasiak — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:04:24 +0000

The HDCCTV Alliance recently released an update to version 1.0 of the HDCCTV Specification for video surveillance.

The HDCCTV specification basically provides the standard that enables megapixel like resolution over traditional coax cabling. This is huge considering that a majority of the surveillance installations remain coax, not having switched to an IP infrastructure because of cost and comfort level. In the past, to implement surveillance that deploys megapixel cameras required some level of transition to IP. Now, legacy surveillance installations (which have lasted for years) have the capability to move to a megapixel like solution, especially for small companies who are faced with smaller budgets and lack of full time IT support.

I am sure there will be plenty to see at ISC West this year.

Of course there’s a storage angle here….more companies having the capability for greater image resolution ultimately means more storage.

Good thing there’s plenty of that to go around.

The real story behind Seagate’s Constellation ES 2TB

Mark Wojtasiak — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:13:12 +0000

Yesterday, Seagate announced availability of it’s 4th generation enterprise nearline drive (Constellation ES) with up to 2TB of capacity.

The 2TB milestone on this drive is not necessarily the headline grab. The real story with Constellation ES is the 6Gb SAS interface. For the past few years, Seagate and others have worked to transition the enterprise market from SCSI and Fibre Channel to SAS, and by in large the transition has been a success, except for the burgeoning market for low cost nearline storage solutions that utilize SATA drives.

Seagate hopes to change that. Leading the way, Seagate brought 3Gb SAS to the nearline space with the previous 3.5-inch version Barracuda ES2, and it’s 2.5-inch brother Constellation. Today, the envelope gets pushed further with Constellation ES boasting twice the interface speed with 6Gb SAS. Of course, Constellation ES is also available in a SATA 3Gb version, but judging from Seagate’s announcement, 6Gb SAS is more ready for primetime in the nearline space and thus first to market.

Perhaps the enterprise ecosystem is just not ready to take advantage of SATA 6Gb. All that work transitioning the market to SAS has paid off. The market is conditioned to take advantage of 6Gb SAS today, and once again, Seagate is attempting to lead the way.

I am not going to go into the virtues of SAS over SATA. You can get that here.

Instead, let’s bring light to the real story here… Seagate wants the market to go SAS. It’s just a matter of time before the others sing the same tune.

Three reasons we’ll see strong US IT growth in 2010

Pete Steege — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:21:44 +0000

Forrester says we’re entering a global tech recovery that will spark significant growth for the US IT industry, for three reasons:

Sustained economic recovery in the U.S., even stronger in China and India
A weaker dollar adds to global measured in dollars
A new tech cycle driven my Smart Computing

Forrester sees this Smart Computing wave as an outcome of the coming together of recent innovations in Business Intelligence, virtualization and cloud computing. They hit their stride in 2010 and combine for some highly productive solutions.

Happy New Year!