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Hitting the hard drive 'sweet spot'
As the data centre evolves, so must the disk drives that populate it, explains Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of storage technology, WD |
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Making dollar-sense out of flash
New ways of deploying Flash are reinforcing economic arguments that will see a growth in the market for 'Big Data Flash', argues Marcos Burnett, Sales Director for Northern Europe, SanDisk |
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Guarding the valuables
Mark Edge, UK Country Manager & VP Sales at Brainloop says that a new approach to IT security is needed: one that guards data within a protected infrastructure |
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None more dense
New 10TB HDD from HGST exploits helium sealed units and SMR |
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Pet project
Royal Veterinary College chooses NetApp to drive research |
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Toshiba PX02SMB160 Enterprise SSD
There can surely no longer be any question that SSD technologies are making a significant inroad into the enterprise, and any remaining worries about reliability are being chipped away with every product release from the main vendors |
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Furthering education
Storage Magazine talks to one of the UK's largest FE colleges, Kirklees College in Yorkshire, on how it has achieved flexibility and adherence using DataCore's Software-defined Storage platform, SANsymphony-V10 to position itself ahead of FELTAG (Further Education Learning Technology Action Group) recommendations |
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Comment
This edition of our e-newsletter has something of a 'hard drive focus', featuring as it does a fascinating opinion piece from WD's Matt Rutledge on how disk drive technologies must evolve to keep up with data centre demands, as well as a news announcement from WD subsidiary HGST about the company's newest HDD offerings. These devices combine two technologies that only a year or two ago seemed to be a long way off 'real world' use: HelioSeal is HGST's ingenious method of sealing the HDD in a helium-filled enclosure for massively improved reliability and longevity, while SMR ('shingling' of data tracks) allows ever higher densities. The new UltraStar Archive Ha 10TB HDD is the first HGST product to combine both technologies for use in the enterprise.
As Matt Rutledge argues, 'web-scale' organisations are facing entirely new storage parameters: "Enterprises have been slow to adopt top capacity drives because higher areal density penalises performance while high platter counts impact cost-per-gigabyte. In archival disk storage, though, slowing performance is acceptable if the counterbalancing rewards are preferable. Consideration of these variables reveals a sweet spot in the market ideal for archival disk with five platters in a one inch-high format. In fact, the five-platter form factor turns out to play particularly well across several data centre segments with both high- and low-intensity workloads." It looks as though, as Rutledge suggests, some HDD manufacturers are now identfiying that 'sweet spot' in the market and targetting it very smartly.
David Tyler,
Editor david.tyler@btc.co.uk
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