IT Pros: Seagate’s First in Enterprise Innovation

The Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD combines hard drive capacity with solid-state speed.

—Guest Blog Contributor Steve Pipe

IT professionals have selected Seagate as the 2013 innovation leader for enterprise hard drives in a recently conducted IT Brand survey.

Survey respondents were asked which company they perceived to be the enterprise drive leader in market, price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation. Seagate ranked first in all categories.

“The focus on innovation, reliability and performance by our development team over the last year has paid off in spades,” said Barbara Craig, senior product marketing manager for enterprise HDDs at Seagate. “This recognition reinforces our commitment to the technical community that manages exabytes of data in the world’s most demanding data centers.”

Seagate’s award was announced at the Open Server Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center in October. Other companies honored included Cisco, VMWare, HP, Intel and Amazon. Survey respondents included IT professionals from AT&T, NASA, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, among other companies and institutions.

In a video recorded at the Open Server Summit to thank the IT professional who voted for Seagate, Jim Phelps, a product marketing manager, noted Seagate has pioneered the use of solid-state hybrid drives (SSHD) in the enterprise. In July, Seagate unveiled its Enterprise Turbo™ SSHD—the industry’s first enterprise SSHD—which combines the capacity of a hard disk with solid-state flash, enabling high-speed performance for mission-critical data.

“The growth in storage is huge,” Phelps said, “but the performance of the drives really hasn’t changed that dramatically. We really needed to do something about that—how do you get to that mountain of data quicker and more effectively? Hybrid drives, which marry a 15K-RPM drive with flash memory, are one way to do that.”

“Industry standard hardware, combined with open-source software, meets the challenges of big data, cloud services, real-time analysis, mega-websites and multimedia,” said Dr. Lance Leventhal, chairperson for Open Server Summit 2013. “The IT Brand Pulse open server, storage and networking leader surveys identify for the first time those whom IT professionals and managers see as the top companies.”