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Seagate's BUMPER State of the Storage Nation announcement

Wannabe 'digital data steward' speaks to the masses

Hybrid drives

Seagate has carved out a distinctive product niche with its hybrid solid state disk drives ((SSHD); disks with a largish chunk of flash cache to speed up hot data access. These are positioned as a halfway house between disk drives and SSDs, offering a high percentage of SSD performance but with the capacity of a disk drive and a cost nearer a disk drive than an SSD. Desktops, notebooks and tablets are are the destination devices for such drives and Seagate says it has shipped 10 million hybrid drives; an impressive number.

Seagate hybrid drives

Seagate hybrid flash/disk drives

Scott Horn, Seagate’s global marketing VP, voiced satisfaction with this; “Hybrid technology is proving to be what we always thought it would be – the ultimate combination of high-performance and needs with the price point that’s right for both budget constrained IT organisations and consumers.”

An IDC analyst, Dave Reinsel, group VP for storage and semiconductors, was quoted by Seagate: “Solid State Hybrid drives [have] an industry growth rate exceeding 400 per cent from Seagate’s FY2013 to FY2014.”

The SSHD category seems to be a virtual Seagate monopoly, WD/HGST and Toshiba not having Seagate’s momentum. While flash drives cost five times and more than equivalent capacity disk drives, Seagate can continue to drive its SSHD products through this wide open price gap door.

Cloud and Enterprise business unit

Seagate has decided that although performance data will move from fast disk drives to flash drives, shrinking the 15K and then 10K disk drive business as a result, capacity data will stay on disk drives. This data is growing; terms like never-ending and explosive growth are being used. There will be enough customers storing tens and hundreds of petabytes and beyond of such data that it makes sense for Seagate to focus on them with a new Cloud and Enterprise Solutions business unit.

This CES unit will “deliver the world’s most scalable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective Cloud service architectures and solutions” and “Seagate is designing the products and services to help the world manage its data pool.” Marketing bombast rules, okay!

CES has four product areas:

  • HPC arrays like the new ClusterStor 9000
  • Components like HDDs and SSDs such as:
    • Nytro flash cards
    • Enterprise Performance and Capacity disk drives
  • Custom products for OEMs
  • Cloud backup, DR and archive - 100TB EVault appliance

Seagate says it will “drive the industry’s ability to manage hyperscale computing demands, improve energy efficiency, and enhance everywhere availability of data.”

Its storage array OEMs will look at the ClusterStor array line and see that Seagate is now computing with them in the HPC and enterprise Big Data storage array market. This will incline them to favour WD/HGST in their disk drive purchases as long as that firm stays out of their array space.

With HGST working with Amplidata on object storage arrays that might only be a short breathing space.

HPC array

The ClusterStor 9000 was the latest iteration of Xyratex’s array technology before Seagate bought Xyratex at the end of 2013. The 9000 topped a line of Lustre parallel file system-running ClusterStor arrays; the 1500, 3000, and 6000 models adding a sustained 1.5TB/sec bandwidth rating with 25 racks crammed with Scalable Storage Units.

“ClusterStor

ClusterStor 9000

At announcement time availability was going to be mid-2014; it is a little late.

On the security front Seagate says there is US government certification validating the ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance (SDA) ability to satisfy Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503 policies and related (DCID 6/3 PL4) cross-domain solution requirements. It supports multiple security levels.

Ken Claffey, ClusterStor VP and GM at Seagate said: “ClusterStor SDA delivers all the necessary tools and support to collaboratively share sensitive information, while strictly complying with security data protection standards.”

Seagate tells us that DKRZ, a national climate computing centre in Hamburg, Germany, is using a ClusterStor 9000 to deliver 45 PB of Lustre-based storage for climate simulation and modelling. We await the first ClusterStor array product developed under Seagate’s control with some interest. Will it be more capacity and bandwidth, like a ClusterStor 10000 model, or will Seagate look to add software, flash hardware to boost speed, and/or re-jig the Intel-based controller hardware to add storage processing punch?

Will it add Kinetic drive support? Will it go into object storage thinking such software is part of the Big Data market going forward?

Any expansion out of the HPC/Big Data Lustre market into adjacent markets would be a cause for concern amongst Seagate’s storage array OEMs.

Next page: EVault

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