As the largest search-engine operator in China, the Beijing-based Baidu responds to billions of search requests each day from people in 138 countries. The company stores and processes massive amounts of data, including websites, images, audio and video documents. To effectively manage it all without driving up costs, the company turned to a system for handling its “cold storage” needs.
Baidu is improving its long-term data-storage capabilities and lowering its costs with an assist from Seagate’s 8TB Archive HDD.
Growing Business
Cold storage refers to data that isn’t accessed regularly, but still must be retained in data centers. Typical cold storage applications include data archiving, object storage and long-term backup. High capacity, low cost and durability are the most important factors for storage deployed in this segment. A number of tech firms, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, offer cold-storage services to businesses and consumers.
To find the right balance of capacity, performance, availability and costs, Baidu designed and developed a rack-mounted server that uses Seagate’s Archive HDDs. The drives—which utilize shingled-magnetic recording (SMR) technology to increase areal density—deliver high capacity and the lowest cost-per-terabyte. That means a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), since the drives use less power and generate less heat than other enterprise drives.
Seagate Archive HDDs also include self-encrypting drive options for secure data storage and fast and easy drive retirement.
Strategic Agreement
Seagate and Baidu have a multi-year history of working together on research in the areas of cold storage, big data analytics and SMR technology. SMR can improve reliability by allowing Seagate to use fewer heads and disks to achieve new capacity points.
“Our data center storage density can be improved with the help of Seagate’s cutting-edge technology,” said Guofeng Chen, a senior technology manager at Baidu. “With Seagate’s Archive HDD, we can cope with unstructured data more effectively and economically.”
“Hierarchical data storage and cold data archiving helps us protect data and lower our TCO, which is valuable for our customers and our company,” added Liu Chao, senior technical director at Baidu. “With Seagate’s proven storage technology, we can cost-effectively address data growth and storage challenges in big data and cloud environments, providing better services and experiences to our users.”
Paul Qian, Seagate director of cloud and enterprise OEM business, said the company’s success with Baidu in cold storage further strengthens our leading position developing products that serve the varied needs of the enterprise market.
“We’re devoted to helping cloud and Internet service providers around the globe solve their pain points,” he said. “This is a great example of how our technology can deliver a real benefit to our customers and their end users.”
