New storage technology can dramatically improve the efficiency of data centers, according to vendor HGST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, as it announced six new flash fabric and active archive offerings.
HGST Virident Space is a high availability system that mirrors clusters of up to 128 servers and 16 peripherals component interconnect (PCIe) storage devices. This creates 38TB of shared high performance Flash storage.
Another product range - Ultrastar He8 - is a series of solid state drives (SSDs) which are both PCI-compliant and work with non volatile memory express (NVMe) in order to simplify flash adoption in data centers. Meanwhile the new HelioSeal system is an hermetically sealed, helium-filled hard disk drive (HDD) range with lower power consumption and cooling needs, claimed the vendor, which makes the product suitable for data center environments.
There are high capacity HDDs in the range, at 6TB, 8TB and 10TB which the vendor claims will offer 33% more capacity and 23% less power consumption. The helium-sealed hard drives would be ideal for ambient data centers, the vendor says.
Finally, the company is re-introducing tape, as a means of bringing back cheap storage for certain categories of data. HGST’s ‘Greenfield Storage Category’ uses an ‘Active Archive’ strategy for data that can be classified as ‘write once and hope to read never’, according to the vendor. Typically this would be used to capture social media, regulatory and compliance analytics data that is rarely, if ever, called upon.
It’s all about providing complete solutions for performance and capacity centric environments, according to Mike Cordano, president of HGST. “We're enabling our data center customers to develop competitive differentiation and profitability for their businesses.”