Whopping 10TB disks spin out of HGST – plus 3.2TB flash slabs

That's not a typo. 10,000GB on spinning platters in helium

Server SAN

Server SANs aggregate the direct-attached storage, either flash or disk, of a group of servers into a single logical block access storage pool. This approach is said to be simpler to manage and easier to scale than a SAN, a networked and shared block access array.

HGST's Server SAN support uses Virident Space to allow clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices. These provide one or more shared volumes with in excess of 38TB of usable capacity.

The clustering is described as high-availability and mirrored and has a management GUI. The company says it is "ideal for shared storage applications like Oracle RAC and Red Hat Global File System that traditionally relied on dedicated SAN storage." It is good for MySQL also because "a single stand-by server can be deployed as an alternative to dedicated replication pairs, saving as much as 37 per cent on total server count."

It can be added to the already shipping Virident ClusterCache for SAN acceleration, Virident Share for Flash pooling and remote access to Flash, and Virident HA for replication, forming what HGST terms a rich and robust flash fabric system.

This should be viewed along with Virident's FlashMax III, vShare and RDMA over InfiniBand, and Velobit caching technology.

Active Archive

HGST asserted that: "Traditionally, tape has offered a low cost method for high capacity storage, but fails to provide fast access to random data sets. Mainstream disk-based storage can meet the performance requirements, but has not been able to meet the cost requirements for petabyte scale storage environments."

It is developing active archive platform featuring in excess of 10PB capacity in a rack. HGST aims to "provide a 10x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to traditional enterprise data centre solutions and a 5x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to commonly used scale-out cloud data centre solutions."

The company "aims to offer the lowest $/TB and Watts/TB in the highest capacity per rack available" and states its systems will form "a complete range of storage architectures including scale-out object storage solutions for public and private cloud data centers."

We understand that this links to the fact that HGST is involved in a joint venture with Amplidata to develop high density object storage arrays, using Amplidata Himalaya software, fuelled by a $10m WD Capital investment in Amplidata.

According to HGST, complete details and specs will be available in early 2015.

Quick comment

With this set of announcements, HGST aims to stride into the front rank of flash and other non-volatile memory component and device suppliers, as well as striking out for disk capacity leadership. We might be seeing the very first indication here of a future integrated WD and HGST operation, with WD and HGST disk assets being combined in one operation and HGST's non-volatile storage technologies being the base of a second - but that requires a leap of imagination.

WD CEO Steve Milligan's HGST disk and flash mob now has to deliver on the vision laid out today, and his competitors have to study what HGST is doing and respond. If you want a quiet life, move away from storage.

Availability

• HGST says that Netflix, Huawei, Inspur and Promise Technology and other OEMs and cloud customers around the world are sampling the He⁸,
• the 10TB SMR/Helium-filled drive is also sampling,
• Huawei, Sugon and Nimble Storage are sampling the UltraStar 7K6000,
• the SN100 SSD series is currently sampling with potential customers,
• Virident Space is being tested by hyperscale and data center customers worldwide, and
• sample delivery of the active archive platform to strategic partners has started.

Get a live replay of HGST's streamed announcement keynote here. ®