Sent to you by raapi via Google Reader:

Seagate enterprise tiered storage decoder ring

It's a bit of an understatement to say that enterprise storage is complicated.

Seagate alone has 7 different drive families in the enterprise storage space with 26 capacity points, and 101 model numbers. Everything from SSDs to hard drives, encrypted to non-encrypted, FIPS to non-FIPS…the landscape can be daunting for anyone to navigate.

You might ask:  Why so many options?  Can't we just have one or two drives that meet the demands of enterprise servers and storage?  This used to be the case when there was simply Seagate Cheetah 10K back in the late 90s early 2000s. Times have changed…enter the realm of:

Tiered Storage

By definition tiered storage "is the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media in order to reduce total storage cost. Categories may be based on levels of protection needed, performance requirements, frequency of use, and other considerations," according to SearchStorage.com.

What "drives" data's level of protection, performance requirements, frequency of use, etc. is largely the applications creating and delivering that data, as well as the nature of the data itself, and how quickly, and how often it is needed.  The idea being that the less often the data is needed, the more it should reside on lower cost, higher capacity storage.  The most mission critical data being at the highest tier (Tier 0) – commonly called "the SSD tier," and the least accessed being in the lowest tier (Tier 3), commonly termed "the archive tier."

To simplify things – consider this visual by Seagate:

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Inside IT Storage using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Sent to you by raapi via Google Reader:

The evolving cloud and how it impacts storage – Part 2 of 4

This past March, Wes Perdue, Seagate's  Director of PLM Cloud Strategy at Seagate spoke at World Hosting Days in Europa-Park Rust, Germany.  The topic: The Evolving Cloud and How it Impacts Storage.  We have taken the transcript of Wes's presentation and created this 4 part series covering:

• Part 1: Storage and the Evolving Cloud
• Part 2: The Seagate Cloud Strategy
• Part 3: Data Protection, Security, and Cold Storage in the Cloud
• Part 4: The Cloud: Keys to Success

Part 2: The Seagate Cloud Strategy

From a strategy standpoint, Seagate is going to be the market leader and the technology leader, and in large part, we will be doing that by developing strategic partnerships.  Engaging with key partners, and through that engagement, understanding what their challenges and what their issues are, so we can bake that back into the product development process and optimize drives that better fit these applications.

Engagement to Understand Requirements is Critical

As we have these engagements; there are a lot of topics that we try to understand. We try to understand the differences and challenges and how they impact hard drives. We will be taking a deeper dive into each and talk about everything from the type of data center infrastructure to security to cold storage to architectures. It has been eye opening for us in the way things are done differently in this (cloud) space.

Data Center Infrastructure

Starting with the data center infrastructure.  You can have a 50,000 or 60,000 square meter data center, or a very small, modular, container type of data center, and what we've learned across the board is that it really doesn't matter the type. What really matters is the application and the architecture from a software standpoint that determines what storage device is needed for that application, or a given set of applications in these data centers.

Data Center Environment

In terms of environment, this has been a big trend or topic of discussion. The tier one service providers are building their own data centers, and just about all of them are deploying free air or fresh air cooling economizers for power and cooling efficiency.  Power and cooling is probably the number one operating expense in a data center.  They want to operate their data centers with this free air-cooling more days out of the year, as much as possible.  At one of Facebook's newest data centers in the northwest part of the United States, they did an environmental study.  They increased the chassis inlet air temperature from 25 degrees C to 30 degrees C, and they raised the relative humidity from 65 percent to 90 percent.  Then, they increased the delta-t temperature from 10 degrees C to 20 degrees C.  What this means to the drive is about a 50 degrees C case temperature. That's getting up there.  We see this trend continuing to occur, and we believe that drives, as well as all components in the system are going to experience harsher environments.

Pushing the Workload Utilization Envelope

In terms of workload utilization, a lot of infrastructures are virtualized; a multi-tenant infrastructure. As we talk to the cloud architects, a lot of them are in the process of revamping their file systems, their software stacks, and they want to improve the utilization of their key components.  They are basically saying, the workloads one year from now will look nothing like they do today.  And that peaks our interest. Think of it this way, whenever a processor isn't calculating, isn't processing, they (the service provider) are not making any money. Whenever a hard drive is not reading and writing, the service provider, again, is not making any money.  So what's ideal for them, what's nirvana is for the hard drives to read and write all the time, 24×7, no idle time which impacts us, because we use some of that idle time to do background checks, to do drive scans.  So, in addition to drives being used in harsher environments, they are going to be working even harder.

Pushing the Efficiency Envelope

Remember that story I told you about the delta-t study, the delta-t temperature increase?  The delta-t temperature is the temperature difference between the hot aisle temperature and the cold aisle temperature. That delta-t temperature put the temperature of the hot aisle at 50 degrees C, and the hot aisle is where the maintenance is done.  So, management said, we need to be kinder to our system admins, so they're going to do maintenance in the cold aisle.  That necessitated the need to change, a design change, that had to move all the cabling to go from one end to the other.  So guess what folks were able to respond very quick to that change, be nimble and adapt, and be very responsive to making that change for this tier one service provider?  Those builders, those integrators working side by side, very closely with these tier one service providers. What we have heard over and over again is this local high-touch technical support is critical to success.

So in what ways is Seagate innovating for the cloud?  We'll cover that in the next post on Data Protection, Security, and Cold Storage in the Cloud.

Stay tuned.

Related Posts:

The evolving cloud and how it impacts storage – Part 1 of 4

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Inside IT Storage using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Sent to you by raapi via Google Reader:

The evolving cloud and how it impacts storage – Part 1 of 4

This past March, Wes Perdue, Seagate's  Director of PLM Cloud Strategy at Seagate spoke at World Hosting Days in Europa-Park Rust, Germany.  The topic: The Evolving Cloud and How it Impacts Storage.  We have taken the transcript of Wes's presentation and created this 4 part series covering:

• Part 1: Storage and the Evolving Cloud
• Part 2: The Seagate Cloud Strategy
• Part 3: Data Protection, Security, and Cold Storage in the Cloud
• Part 4: The Cloud: Keys to Success

Part 1: Storage and the Evolving Cloud

The cloud space is very important to Seagate.  In fact it's a strategic imperative.  The service providers do things just a little bit different than their traditional IT brethren.  They push the envelope in a lot of different ways, increasing efficiencies, improving costs, and we're off as a drive manufacturer to fully understand those differences and what opportunities exist to optimize storage devices for this space.

The WW Cloud Market

From a storage growth standpoint, in terms of US dollars in billions, the worldwide cloud services market is approximately 100 billion dollars and in a couple years, it's approaching 150 billion dollars.  As a hard drive manufacturer, it's difficult to hard to get our arms around what this means from a capacity or a drive unit standpoint. But, what we know is that these services enable and drive new applications, and those applications need data, and they need storage.

2011 Cloud Markets by Geo

From a worldwide perspective, about 57 percent of the cloud services revenue is in the Americas, 19 percent in Europe, and the rest in Asia Pacific. If you had to look one area with the strongest growth, it's probably in Asia Pacific.  They have the smallest percentage, but the largest potential.

Connected Devices need Servers

Over the next few years, analysts are projecting 790 million smartphones and 300 million tablets will be sold worldwide. According to Intel, for every 600 smartphones, you need a server, and for every 122 tablets, you need a server.  So you need 1.3 million servers to support those smartphones. You need 2.5 million servers to support those tablets.  That's 3.8 million servers to support this mobile infrastructure.  And, servers require storage.

Enterprise Capacity Demand

So, how many drives? How much capacity in terms of enterprise drives that went into a cloud infrastructure.  Last year, 2011, 23 percent of enterprise capacity was for a cloud infrastructure. And in a couple years, that's projected to be 39 percent. Seagate does not contend that all data is going to go into the cloud, because the nature of some of the data, and/or the culture of some companies. In particular, with public clouds, there is just going to be data companies simply don't entrust to a third party.  They may create a private cloud behind their firewall within their four walls instead.  Still, we don't know that every piece of data created is going to be in the cloud at some point in time, but need less to say, a good portion of data will be.

The Demand for Storage Devices

What we do know is that this is driving a lot of storage devices.  By the end of the decade, we are looking at a billion hard drives, and over 200 million solid-state drives shipped worldwide.  If we project that more than half of these devices will be in the cloud in some way shape or form, it's important to understand how cloud service providers do things differently, and design such requirements into our products.

We'll cover that in future posts in this series.  The next post will cover exactly how Seagate is strategizing around the cloud.

Stay tuned.

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Inside IT Storage using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites