It’s impressive how much the flash market is shaking things up in the world of storage.  The flash enabled storage stack is ripe with opportunity, and Seagate, as usual, knows how to leverage its strengths to take advantage.  Hence, the investment in Virident captured nicely by this article on Forbes and the launch of the new Seagate X8 Accelerator, 600 Pro and 1200 Series SSDs last week.

Seagate’s new flash storage products fill the gamut in enterprise storage. Sure, we have satisfied many needs in the SSD space for the past few years, but Seagate’s portfolio is truly “all-in” now.  With the addition of a complete portfolio of flash products, is there another storage device supplier that has the enterprise storage market covered as well as Seagate? I guess it depends on who you ask.

When I look at the portfolio Seagate has amassed, I can’t help but think that enterprise server and storage partners can build almost anything imaginable with the use of Seagate products.  And, if they can build almost anything, they can solve almost any storage related customer need.

The exciting news is that there is still more to come.  What’s missing in this space is a device that takes the performance of flash and the capacity of disk to create an entirely new approach to enterprise storage – solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs).  They are gathering momentum fast in the client space, so it’s just a matter of time before they take hold in the enterprise space…and believe me, they’re coming.

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I don’t know about you, but I think it’s about time to give up on marketing and positioning hard drives by rotations per minute (RPM).  Here are 5 reasons why the days of marketing the RPM spec in the enterprise/data center space should be over:

1. Customers pay for IOPS, not RPMs.  RPMs or spin speed is just a means to an end. It does not communicate effectively what the disk drive is capable of delivering in terms of performance.  It’s like the old CD-RW drives that were spec’d at 8x, 12x, 24x – and we know those days are long gone.  The real measure of performance is IOPS or Input/Output Operations per Second. If you look at how Rackspace and Amazon market cloud compute, or how quickly Big Data can be analyzed, it’s all about IOPS.

2. The rise of Flash.  When it comes to maximizing IOPS (reason #1), there is no better solution today than flash based storage whether it be DRAM, PCIe, or Solid State Drives (SSDs). No doubt 15,000 RPM and 10,000 RPM server hard drives will have their place for years to come, but we cannot argue against the growth of flash in the IO intensive applications where data is the hottest. Plus RPMs aren’t the reason IT buyers choose to deploy 15K or 10K drives. It’s more about meeting a certain level of IOPS with needed capacity at an attractive cost. This brings rise to our third reason.

3. Hybrid is the best of both words. Whether we are talking hybrid systems or solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs), hybrid storage doesn’t rely on RPMs to market it’s benefits to IT.  It’s all about delivering the right level of performance and capacity, and the ability to move data from flash to disk and back up to flash based entirely on demand for said data. Who really cares if a hybrid system uses 10,000 RPM, 7,200 RPM, or even 5,400 RPM drives?  As long as it delivers on capacity and performance requirements, the RPM spec is irrelevant. You can read more about this in the latest edition of FAST Magazine: Choosing High-Performance Storage is not About RPM Anymore.

4. The Power of power. How many times a day are we bombarded with news on how much data is growing? We get it, it’s huge, and it’s putting more and more pressure on one particular resource that we all know is not infinite –  energy. With fast data growth comes the need to store it somewhere.  Given that most of this unstructured data is cold (accessed infrequently) it does not need to be stored high performance storage.  It belongs on low cost, high capacity storage that consumes less power. Less is more and that’s the power of the power spec.

 5. It’s just plain old. The last time a new hard drive spin speed was introduced was over a decade ago (15,000 RPM), and since then we have seen advancements in areal density which delivers higher capacity and performance, security in the form of self-encrypting drive technology, energy efficiency features like Seagate’s PowerChoice, and let’s not forget interface improvements like 6Gb/s SAS, and now 12Gb/s SAS. In fact, one could argue, spin speed or RPM has not changed at all.  In the fast moving world that is information technology, innovation is critical, and when it comes to how fast we can spin some platters, it just isn’t there.

Long live touting innovations that actually deliver greater capacity, higher IOPS, lower power, and relevant features that IT Pros are willing to pay for, because RPM just ain’t cutting it anymore.

Agree?

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“Solid-State Drives Will Complement, Not Replace, Hard-Disk Drives in Data Centers,” says Gartner Research via StorageNewsletter.com.  

The timing of this report is great because this this “off season,” we at Seagate were getting serious about adding some real speed to our lineup.

The best baseball teams have great speed and the capacity to hit, pitch, and play defense. According to Gartner, Data centers are no different.

Clearly, for leading storage makers like Seagate, it’s never been a matter of “if” we would embrace SSD as the future of high performance storage, but “how and where”?  

To keep the baseball metaphor going…it’s time to get serious about adding some speed and get these runners on the bases.  With a PCIe SSD, a SAS based SSD, and a low cost SATA based SSD, the bases are now loaded, and waiting in the on-deck circle is Seagate – the company.

The difference between hitting a grand slam and striking out ultimately comes from years of practice, experience in reading the pitcher, and making educated guesses at what pitch is coming next.  It comes down to execution. Executing not only from a product portfolio perspective, but in terms of data center customer service and support, manufacturing yields and supply assurance, and on-going research and development to  not only be relevant in the SSD space, but lead.

Let’s face it, Seagate has a packed lineup with players that can run and hit for average:

• X8 Accelerator powered by Virident
• 1200 Series SSD
• 600 Pro Series SSD
• Enterprise Performance 15K HDD
• Enterprise Performance 10K HDD
• Enterprise Capacity 2.5 HDD
• Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD
• Enterprise Value HDD

And, if our plans for an enterprise solid state hybrid drive (SSHD) come to fruition this year, you can add that fresh new bat to the lineup. That makes 9 players, each with their own role in the game – a team.  Just like any team, you’re not going to win by playing offense only…you need solid pitching and defense, and that is where executing on our product roadmap, supply, and support will ultimately determine if Seagate can take home the ring. It’s a long season, and I’m feeling pretty good about our lineup, it now comes down to executing the game plan day in and day out.

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When it comes to storage performance, you simply cannot beat the advantages of flash, and if performance is the #1 metric by which you measure storage TCO, then this infographic does a great job of providing a creative and informative look at the advantages of flash over spinning media. But, we all know storage is not that simple. There are other variables at play here.  The most glaring (okay, obvious) one is capacity. There are also numerous variables associated with solution design, deployment, and operations like application compatibility, interoperability, supply assurance, and service and support.

My point is that data just doesn’t need to move faster. The Achilles heel for most companies is that the faster data moves, the more of it is created, and thus, the more of it that needs to be stored. And, that my friends is a capacity TCO story.

So, when exploring the true TCO of storage, take a step back and look at the entire picture. Odds are how you rank your metrics will change at each stage of the data lifecycle.

Image by Whiptail

Lifehacker runs the MacGyver Challenge, and this past week, they asked hackers to create something using old computer parts. The “old computer part” that received a lot of utility and attention was the hard drive.

• The Winner: Mount Your Camera Almost Anywhere Using a Hard Drive Magnet
• Reorient Your Toilet Paper Holder (using a Hard Drive Platter)
• Make a Clock From an Old Hard Drive

- Joshua McKenty – CTO, Piston Cloud and Board Member of OpenStack. 

If you are wondering what exactly OpenStack is, Ryan Cox of Silicon Angle published a great post summarizing a discussion at theCUBE at the OpenStack Summit this week with co-hosts John Furrier – Founder, SiliconANGLE and Jeff Frick – theCUBE. “OpenStack allows the application developers to do amazing things on top of the software-defined infrastructure. The most disruptive industry because of OpenStack? Storage, according to McKenty. “Storage is terrified right now. Storage is a giant bastion of proprietary software.”

So, how does Joshua define Openstack?

• ONE community
• TWO kinds of clouds (Public, Private)
• THREE kinds of interfaces (command, web dashboard, program API)
• FOUR kinds of resources (2 storage, 2 virtual)
• FIVE actors (vendors, operators, auditors, users, end users)

Check out all the videos from the Openstack Summit c/o SiliconANGLE

Seagate joined Openstack this past February to “help cloud builders to develop more scalable, customizable solutions using open platforms while reducing operating costs and providing benefits for consumers in the marketplace.”  It’s through this direct engagement with customers and open source communities that Seagate is better positioned to develop products that set new standards for lower TCO and higher productivity. In the era of open source, the solutions the technology industry brings to market must be a collaborative effort among suppliers, partners and end-customers. We expect to be a key contributor to numbers 1-2-3-4-5 above.

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The following guest blog is by Mike Crump, VP, manufacturing quality and supplier quality engineering/Asia, and Harrie Netel, director, quality data analytics.

Seagate creates and stores staggering amounts of data.

Stored on 650 Seagate enterprise-class hard drives and 42 SSDs in Seagate’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is everything from the history of more than 2 billion Seagate drives to manufacturing, customer and supplier information.

The amount of data stored at EDW in Oklahoma City defines “Big Data” — data so large and complex it’s difficult to process using traditional processing applications. Big Data is particularly valuable because more information can be obtained from analyzing a single set of large data than from multiple sets of data with the same information.

Last year, the Operations Quality Analytics team took on the challenge of turning Big Data into information that can be acted on to uncover threats, make informed decisions, and drive sound business outcomes and factory quality improvements.

First, the team tackled automated ODT (Outgoing DPPM Test) reporting. Collaborating with IT, the team developed a solution using eCube, a powerful Seagate application that slices and dices enormous amounts of data and completes analyses in hours instead of days or weeks.

The solution — implemented six months ago in Suzhou, Wuxi and Korat — freed up 11 engineers, who had been manually compiling and distributing reports, to spend a lot more time searching for hidden patterns and trends in the data that can indicate potential quality issues.

Besides making it easier to pinpoint problems that might not surface until they are in the field, the automated data analysis process provides higher quality information to factory process engineering teams. It also enables quicker decisions and actions closer to the factory floor.

Automating the ODT process already is helping to improve quality. Collaboration between the Quality Analytics and Operations teams has resulted in issues being uncovered at factory workstations and with components coming from a voice coil motor supplier. “Maverick lots,” or abnormal groups of drives, also have been identified.

The improvements are reflected in Seagate’s overall quality performance. Customers also recognize how we’re using analytics. HP and Dell say we are far ahead of our competition in using Big Data to improve business and quality outcomes.

With the automated ODT reporting and analysis process up and running, the team is focused on linking process and performance information from suppliers with data from field quality systems and factories, including Ongoing Reliability Test (ORT) results.

Linking data “end-to-end” (from supplier and factory to end-user performance) will create a true Big Data system that will help identify key data including supplier parameters most important to product performance. That knowledge will remove a lot of risk from our decision making, push decisions to a lower level and make it easier to adjust quality systems and metrics at our suppliers to ensure we receive parts that meet our expectations.

By monitoring and catching issues “upstream” at our suppliers, rather than “testing for quality at the end of the factory line,” we’ll go a long way toward keeping problems out of the factories and sustaining our quality improvements.

Developing end-to-end analytics also will help lay the groundwork for our vision of defect-free Seagate factories.

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Granted, open source is nothing new. Linux  is proof of that, but you cannot argue the sheer velocity this movement has had over the past year.  Just look at the contributions - both technologically and monetarily - into the open source space, OpenStack in particular. I have been singing the praises of open source software and hardware for some time now. Call it excitement, or rebellion from the traditional enterprise way of doing things, or just a necessary evil given the momentum this movement has – especially in the cloud space.  Whether you call the momentum hype or reality, you cannot argue it’s not refreshing.

The single most refreshing aspect of OpenStack, the Open Compute Project, or any open source platform or foundation is the focus on community, partnering, and innovation.  Seagate has been involved with OpenStack and the Open Compute Project since officially joining in February, and never in my 7 years at Seagate has there been more excitement and “openness” in partnering with a component company like us to innovate on solutions at both the software level, and the server & storage hardware level.

It doesn’t get any fresher than that…queue video by dopenstack.

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