Howard Marks is writing a series on hard drive evolution. This looks back to times when storage media was removable, 14-inch disks were a thing, and drive controllers existed off disk. While spinning media may be losing mind share to SSDs these days, Howard gives the historical context to show just how much engineering has gone into the modern hard drive.
Seagate’s Vaguely Unsettling Multi-Actuator Drives
Mechanical hard drives are fighting a losing war against flash in most markets. That doesn’t diminish the fact that they are marvels of engineering. The precision needed to add increasing density and platters is truly a remarkable feat of technology. Seagate just upped the technical “wow” quotient by announcing upcoming drives with multiple independent actuators.
Tiering vs Caching, SvSAN Lets You Go Sans SAN, and DNA Petabits in Gestalt Storage News 17.2
In this iteration of Gestalt Server News:
– Caching vs Tiering? The On-Premise IT Roundtable wants to clear up the confusion!
– StorMagic’s SvSAN for the edge
– and weird DNA storage
Plus Preston de Guise begs the question: what constitutes a successful backup?
X-IO: On the Edge of Reinvention
X-IO Technologies understand the dilemma of reinvention. They’ve been around since 2002, originally as part of the Seagate Advanced Storage Group. A fifteen year company history and a focus on traditional storage arrays combine to make it hard for the company to seem like the new hotness. This is not to take away from the company’s accomplishments. The traditional enterprise storage market is ruthlessly competitive, and they’ve carved out over 1,500 customers. The company remains dedicated to these customers.
But the company can also read some tea leaves. There is a decided move away from custom hardware, and an embrace of commodity, perhaps best exemplified by the announced death of Dell EMC’s DSSD. In response to this, X-IO looks to pivot with an entirely new line of business. They’ve moving to the edge.
Scale Out Storage: The ARM Race Begins
I always thought increasing hard drive capacity was an unequivocally good thing. Maybe it’s just my consumer focused naïveté, but I never thought there could be much of a downside of constantly increasing drive size. More storage is just better, right? Well not when you’re worried about failure. Enrico Signoretti lays out the issue with […]
8TB disks still looking solid, seem to be some of Seagate’s best
Backblaze published their drive reliability figures. They’ve got a few drives to derive data from, having 300PB of data kind of requires it. The company recently upgraded from 2TB drives from HGST and Western Digital to new Seagate 8TB drives. There was some concern that if these had significantly higher failure rates than the 2TB drive they would prove less cost effective. Afterall, the the HGST drives had a failure rate of just 1.6%.
Seagate Inks Deal To Acquire Xyratex
Howard Marks writing for Network Computing comments: Disk drive giant aims to move into the more profitable storage systems market with $374 million acquisition. January is acquisition season for companies. I don’t think this will be the last time we see a storage company being bought in the first quarter of 2014. Read more at: […]
Response: Reinventing Storage — Ethernet üBer Alles! | Speaking of Clouds
Greg Ferro of EtherealMind comments: Put an Ethernet port directly onto the hard disk drive controller sounds obvious unless you work in the storage industry where shibboleths are notoriously difficult to abandon. EMC and NetApp are still building arrays that use Infiniband and FiberChannel as backplane protocols and selling them as “modern”. But the possible […]
The Assymetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) mode on CLARiiON
I’ve noticed that I have been getting a lot of search engine hits relating to the various features, specifications and problems on the EMC CLARiiON array. One of the searches was related to a feature that has been around for a bit. It was actually introduced in 2001, but in order to give a full explanation I’m just going to start at the beginning.
Virtualisation: Learning The Hard Way
They say that you learn the most when you make mistakes and things go wrong. Well, last night I certainly must have learned a lot. What started as a simple physical re-organisation of my hardware turned into a rebuild of my production VMware ESXi server – finishing at 1am.