Seagate Revs Up Flash Portfolio with New SSDs at Flash Memory Summit

Seagate is revving up its flash-storage portfolio with updates to its Nytro solid-state line, along with a demonstration of a blisteringly-fast 64TB SSD.

The new products debut today at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California.

The updated solid-state drives—including the Nytro® 5000 M.2 non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD and the Nytro 3000 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD—address different segments of the cloud and data center markets and help customers maximize the value of their data.

Seagate also will showcase a 64TB NVMe add-in card reading at 13 gigabytes per second—the fastest and highest-capacity SSD ever demonstrated.

Here’s a closer look at what’s new.

Seagate 64TB NVMe SSD

Seagate’s technology demonstration takes advantage of the industry standard M.2 form factor to combine eight SSD controllers into a single PCIe NVMe add-in card. As a result, servers benefit from multiple high-performance controllers managing the SSD’s flash capacity through the one PCIe socket. Customer samples of the technology are anticipated in the first half of 2018.

The demonstration shows the future of hyperscale and high-performance computing (HPC) storage solutions, says Kent Smith, senior director of product marketing, Seagate flash products.

“We see this as an ideal technology for hyperscalers, HPC and big data analytics,” Smith says. “Applications where you have to offload tons of data off the DRAM into storage that’s fast and super-high capacity. Weather forecasting is one example, where you have a lot of data and variables to crunch. With speeds of 13GB/second and a record 64TB, this is an incredibly fast SSD with loads of capacity.”

Nytro 5000

The new Nytro 5000 NVMe SSD is a cost-effective, lower-power technology with 2TB of industry-leading capacity. With performance levels as high as 67,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per watt, it doubles the performance of the previous-generation product, the Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD.

The Nytro 5000 is targeted at direct-attached storage, acting as a cache for HDDs, and helping to separate “hot” data from “cold” data. The Nytro 5000 also is available in Seagate Secure™ SED (self-encrypting drive) models with the TCG (Trusted Computing Group) protocol.

The SSD’s new features match the growing needs of demanding enterprise applications like data mining and online transaction processing, where fast data access and processing power are key. It has five times the sequential read and twice the random read performance of SATA SSDs.

Nytro 3000

The new Nytro 3000 SAS SSD offers enhanced capacity—up to 15TB, or more than four times the capacity of the previous version, the Seagate 1200.2 SAS SSD—and  performance features, and a dual-port SAS interface to maintain data integrity. It also offers more than 2,200 megabytes per second (MB/s) in sequential read performance through a 12 gigabits per second (Gb/s) SAS dual-port interface. All of which means less storage bottlenecks and higher data reliability, availability and scalability.

“This is an ideal solution for organizations that are already using SAS as their storage infrastructure,” Smith explains. “IT and data center managers don’t have to throw out everything and start from scratch.”

The Nytro 3000 is aimed at data center environments where data availability and capacity are critical, such as content streaming services and software-defined storage (SDS) configurations.

The Nytro 5000 NVMe M.2 SSD and Nytro 3000 SAS SSD will be available later this year using 3D NAND flash technology. The new SSDs also reflect a simplified branding, with the “Nytro” name now encompassing Seagate’s enterprise-class NVMe and SAS SSD lines.

“We already had a broad array of flash products,” Smith says. “These new solutions expand our portfolio and show the significant IP that we’ve developed for this segment, and they reflect how Seagate continues pushing the industry forward.”

2017-12-06T17:19:48+00:00

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Steve Pipe