The “stars” are aligned for cloud storage

Today, Seagate announced a massive 1.0TB 2.5-inch enterprise capacity optimized hard drive for bulk data applications, otherwise known as nearline or business critical. The 2nd generation Constellation hard drive doubles its capacity to 1.0TB and it is available in both 6Gb/s SAS and 6Gb/s SATA interfaces.  Barbara Craig, Product Marketing Manager for Constellation and enterprise blogger  has a post all about it…check it out.

One angle to consider with the introduction of a 1.0TB 2.5-inch drive is what it brings to data centers transitioning to an all 2.5-inch infrastructure, especially cloud storage providers. The cloud is all about efficiency and cost reduction, and now providers have the ability to standardize on chassis that take 2.5-inch drives for not only applications, but pure storage.  The 1.0TB capacity point now makes more sense for moving to 2.5-inch nearline. Before, with 500GB, the drive may have been limited to SMB servers and smaller storage systems, but now, we can cram a full 24TB in a 2U rack. The same capacity point used with 12x 2.0TB 3.5-inch drives.

Think about the flexibility offered by 2.5-inch. The rest of the enterprise is already moving, or already has moved that way with mission critical drives like the Savvio 10K, Savvio 15K, and SSD drives like Seagate’s Pulsar.

Standardized chassis means:

• Lower inventory costs – no need to stock 2 form factors
• Lower drive management and replacement costs – you can slide any 2.5-inch drive into the system based on needs
• Protection from system obsolescence – easier system upgrades extend the life if the solution
• Customization – integrate 7200, 10K, 15K, or SSD based on customers’ application requirements
• Maximized footprint – greater system density, maximizes available rack space and minimizes energy consumption

Sounds like greater efficeincy and flexibility to me…the stars must be aligned for the cloud and it looks like a new Constellation.

Related Posts:

The death of the hard drive? C’mon people…
Biggest server monsters taking over the world, Exabyte by Exabyte
Cliff Notes: Seagate whitepaper on cloud computing
Seagate’s view of Cloud Computing’s impact on storage