OCP Summit: How Cloud Data Centers Scale to Accommodate Ever-Growing Amounts of Data

  • Hyperscale data centers

Welcome to the OCP Summit 2017, hosted by the Open Compute Project this week, March 8 and 9 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Seagate’s here joining more than 2,500 IT architects who typically attend the summit from the technology, finance, government and consulting sectors. Worldwide the OCP community comprises thousands of participants spanning hundreds of companies, each working to further develop and define the OCP specifications and make possible the most flexible, efficient and sustainable infrastructures.

Hyperscale Data Centers, and why the Open Compute Project is so important

As cloud data centers scale to accommodate ever-growing amounts of data, traditional data center approaches won’t meet their needs for reasons of scale, cost and performance.

Instead, organizations are taking cues from companies like Facebook to create commodity- and open standards-based storage based on storage specifications set forth by the Open Compute Project (OCP) and other open models.

Here’s why: This approach can help reduce the complexity of hyperscale computing and make it accessible to all organizations grappling with how to scale their data centers — from cloud service providers to traditional enterprises like those in the government and financial services sectors.

Following the standards put forth by OCP, the approach emphasizes more efficient design and deployment of commodity infrastructure to help address the data deluge despite the budget constraints so many organizations face, providing a viable way to scale while handling ever-growing amounts of data.

Seagate’s involvement with the Open Compute Project

Today’s hyperscale data centers want to adopt the fastest and highest capacity storage technology with the latest and most sustainable standards. OCP storage specifications help meet these objectives by reducing the power and cost burdens traditionally associated with operating at this level of performance.

Seagate believes this OCP-focused approach offers the best model to accelerate the innovations needed to support data growth in cloud data centers — while also enabling enterprises to easily scale their infrastructure as their data needs evolve.

Seagate is actively invested in driving these developments, and it’s paying off today in what we’re able to deliver for data center customers.

Architects of Data-Driven Empires

As a key player in the OCP community, our involvement is multifaceted. We work with other OCP members to understand the needs of, and find consensus within, the industry — and to define the direction and design of future OCP Open-Compute-Projectsolutions and to solve storage challenges faced by hyperscale players, from developing common APIs for managing drive health, to designing the world’s most energy efficient architectures to handle unprecedented scale at the lowest possible cost.

And, our storage solutions are part of OCP-compliant partner solutions from many leaders, with several showing solutions at OCP this week including Dell EMC, Inspur, Marvell, Mellanox, Red Hat, QCT and Wiwynn.

Seagate’s enterprise data center portfolio — a complete ecosystem of HDD, SSD and storage system products — is designed to help customers manage the deluge of data they face and move the right data where it’s needed fast to meet rapidly evolving business priorities and market demands.

This portfolio includes technologies that meet OCP specifications and can help hyperscale data centers obtain more value from the rapidly expanding amount of data they must contend with, even under the most demanding application requirements.

New Seagate OCP-compliant technology leads the way

Among Seagate’s offerings that meet OCP specifications are new flash and hard drive innovations that push speed, capacity and density limits for today’s data centers.

12TB Enterprise Capacity HDD

At this year’s OCP Summit, Seagate announced our new 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD, designed to deliver highly scalable and energy-efficient hard drive storage using Seagate’s power-efficient helium technology while supplying more than 10PB of capacity in a standard 42U rack, resulting in improved total cost of ownership.

This new hard drive design supports even denser storage solutions than before, but uses the same data center infrastructure — ideal for data centers looking to more efficiently and cost-effectively scale to accommodate increasing amounts of data.

Building on our fast-growing flash innovations

At Booth #B7 on the floor of the Summit we’re also demonstrating our new SSD technologies for the future. They include:

  • Our fastest NVMe M.2 SSD, featuring high-speed boot and caching in an ultra-small M.2 form factor.
  • A dense, low-power 4TB NVMe M.2 SSD in an ultra-small M.2 form factor and ideal for all-flash arrays.

These technology innovations reflect the reality of data centers working to accommodate an ever-increasing amount of data: Time is money, and your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use.

These SSD technologies will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains.

They represent an ideal for data centers seeking to easily grow with their data without losing the ability to quickly access and process it — a scenario commonly seen in applications involving high-performance computing, scale-out databases and Big Data analytics, such as scientific research and weather modeling.

These are just a few compelling examples of how Seagate’s depth and breadth of technology innovation continues to move ahead to help meet data center needs, regardless of data center size or specialty. Our aim as a key member of OCP continues to be innovating to help IT architects push the envelope on storage capacity, scale, cost, performance and security.

Architects of Data-Driven Empires

2017-12-06T18:23:18+00:00

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