Distributed creative content teams need to share content files from a multiplicity of devices and locations. CTERA’s Media Filer enables that, adding cloud-scale and security to the mix.
CTERA produces secure cloud storage gateways cum Edge filers. It has developed this technology to build a cloud-connected edge filer box, the HC2400M, for media and entertainment-type operations.
CTERA Edge Filer product line.
This all-in-one box provides the access speed of local files, the scale of the cloud and enables media file sharing by distributed content teams. The specifications are:
Existing NAS systems can be tossed. The Media Filer provides transparent migration from them with preservation of share structure and file permissions. It also has intelligent cloud tiering which can automatically move files not needed for current projects or reference up to a cloud. This can be public or private, and S3 is supported.
Once evicted such moved files have a stub left behind, pointing to the cloud destination. This slows access and then restoration from the cloud adds to the file’s access latency. The Media Filer causes instant streaming from the cloud when a stub is opened to mitigate this.
Users can specify that certain files stay local to guarantee the fastest access performance.
CTERA has added source-based encryption, firewall fencing, virus scanning and Active Directory integration. To support distributed teams the Media Filer has:
Continuous multi-site sync between filers and endpoints
Cloud-mapped cached desktop drive for roaming team members
Native and secure access mobile app
Direct cloud upload of large files
Authenticated web access for external users.
There is built-in backup and archiving with file-level versioning for users to self-restore files.
Advertising business WPP is a flagship Media Filer customer. The Media Filer is available now through CTERA’s channel and you can download a datasheet.
All-flash array revenues fell in the second 2019 quarter and the total storage market slumped almost 10 per cent year-on-year, according to IDC
We should note IDC has altered how it calculates suppliers’ total enterprise storage systems sales in its Storage Tracker report for the second 2019 quarter.
William Blair analyst Jason Ader reports: “IDC has amended how it reports total storage numbers in August 2019 to include servers with fewer than three drives within the enterprise storage market, thus increasing the total size of the market on a historical basis.”
IDC’s number crunchers totted up total enterprise storage market revenues of $13.23bn in Q2 2018. Using the new calculation method, this more than doubles to $28.62bn. IDC’s Q2 2019 total is $25.9bn, down 9.5 per cent.
Ader says: “This compares to 4.1 per cent growth in the prior quarter and 35.9 per cent growth in the year-ago quarter.” There has been a pronounced fall in storage revenue growth, taking it into negative territory. This is attributed to cloud data centres buying fewer servers, which reduced internal/server-based storage revenue.
However this is expected to return to growth with cloud data centre storage buying from ODMs. IDC forecasts five-year CAGR of 8.9 per cent through 2023. IDC us seeing more growth in server SANs than external storage. Ader says: It expects growth in internal OEM storage systems to outpace external storage systems over the forecast period, generating CAGR of 8.5 per cent through 2023 (compared to 1.1 per cent CAGR for external storage).
Suppliers’ total storage revenue market shares in the quarter were;
Dell Technologies – 21.6 per cent
HPE (including H3C China JV) – 16.5 per cent
IBM – 6.6 per cent
Inspur – 5.7 per cent
Lenovo 4.9 per cent
The calculation change has caused NetApp and Pure Storage to fall out of the top 5 supplier ranking, to be replaced by Inspur and Lenovo.
Worldwide all-flash array market revenue for the quarter was $2.09bn, down 0.7 per cent, on the back of reduced demand and lower NAND pricing. In contrast there was 18 per cent growth last quarter and 48 per cent growth a year ago.
All-flash array supplier shares were:
Dell Technologies 28 per cent
NetApp -17 per cent
HPE/H3C -14 per cent
Pure Storage – 12 per cent
IBM – 10.1 per cent
Others – 17.3 per cent
Pure Storage is slowly but steadily growing market share;
The all-flash arrays systems market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 10.8 per cent through 2023.
Customers could go straight to 18TB and 20TB disk drives from current 14TB drives, bypassing the 16TB capacity level.
So says Aaron Rakers, a senior analyst at Wells Fargo, following a recent conversation with Western Digital CEO Stephen Milligan and CFO Rob Eulau. He learnt that WD has not seen any signs of significant share recapture from Seagate after its competitor launched 16TB drives. Hence the notion that 16TB could be a waystation between the14 and 18TB drive capacities.
In a note to subscribers last week, Rakers said 16TB could represent a soft cycle vs. an industry move from 14TB to 18TB.
Let’s see how Seagate’s 16TB drive shipments fare over the next two or three quarters. This will tell us if Rakers’ notion is correct.
Seagate uses 9 platters for its 16TB disk drive technology. Major customers have qualified the products and volume shipments are expected by June, 2020.
Western Digital last week announced 18TB drive technology, with a 20TB implementation using shingled magnetic recording. These also have 9 platters. Rakers estimates that WD’s cost structure is up to 20 per cent lower than Seagate can achieve for 9-platter drives, due to higher capacity and use of aluminium rather than glass platters.
These WD drives sample by the end of this year with volume ships starting in the first half of 2020. This is roughly the same time as Seagate ramps up 16TB shipments.
WD can produce a 16TB drive if demand is significant, by removing a platter or a read/write head pair from its 18TB drives.
Amazon has cut prices by 44 per cent for Elastic File System (EFS) when using Infrequent Access (IA) with Lifecycle Management.
Amazon EFS customers enable Lifecycle Management and any file not accessed after 14, 30, 60 or 90 days is automatically moved to the EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class. This enables customers to reduce storage costs by up to 92 per cent compared to EFS Standard storage class, which costs$0.30/GB/month.
When launched in February 2019 EFS IA cost $0.045/GB/month. It is now $0.025/GB/month. “This is one of the largest price drops in the history of AWS to date!” AWS technical evangelist Steve Roberts wrote in an official AWS blog.
He cited “Industry analysts such as IDC, and our own analysis of usage patterns confirms, that around 80 per cent of data is not accessed very often. The remaining 20 per cent is in active use.”
With that in mind here’s the blog’s pricing example looking at storage costs for 100TB of file data;
20 per cent of 100TB = 20TB at $0.30/GB-month = $0.30 x 20 x 1,000 = $6,000
80 per cent of 100TB = 80TB at $0.025/GB-month = $0.025 x 80 x 1,000 = $2,000
Total for 100TB = $8,000/month or $0.08/GB-month. Remember, this price also includes (for free) multi-AZ, full elasticity, and strong file system consistency.
Total for 100TB in EFS standard = $30,000/month, meaning a saving of $22,000/month.
EFS IA with Lifecycle Management moves files from EFS to EFS IA transparently to applications. The data remains accessible within the same file system namespace albeit with a slightly higher latency; double digit ms vs single digit ms, AWS says.
Blocks & Files understands AWS views competitors as not having the capability of such a low-cost tier.
The Isilon ONeFS filer OS has been updated to v8.2.1 and adds hardware accelerated in-line compression and inline deduplication capabilities.
This version can provide up to 140 per cent greater usable capacity, depending on the workload, compared to OneFS 8.2 based solutions.
That means it can;
Scale cluster capacity up to 139 PB of usable capacity up from 58 PB in OneFS 8.2.
Deliver up to 3:1 compression and in-line deduplication on the F810 all-flash platform depending on the dataset.
In-line compression and deduplication operations on the F810 seamlessly interoperate with all existing Isilon storage platforms and all OneFS software modules.
Increased storage capacity and efficiency reduces data centre footprint and rthe esources consumed.
OneFS 8.2.1 is available now.
Portable Drives from Seagate
Seagate has announced a pair of cloth-wrapped portable drives at IFA 2019 in Berlin. The white or black cloth covered One Touch SSD holds 500GB or 1TB while the One Touch SSD Special Edition has a cover in camo patterns themed red, green, blue or white and storing 500GB.
The cloth-wrapped One Touch drives.Isn’t high-tech wonderful?
The drives include:
Seagate’s Toolkit with Sync Plus continuous backup software,
File transfer speeds up to 400MB/s sequential read/write,
Compatibility with both PC and Mac (exFAT) via USB 3.0 interface (braided USB 3.0 cable included,)
Complimentary 2-month subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan and a one-year subscription to Mylio Create.,
3-year warranty.
They are available in October and MSRP prices are $104.99 (500GB) and $199.99 (1TB) for the One Touch and $109.99 (500GB) for the One Touch Special Edition.
SwiftStack
An IDC report, “SwiftStack Stakes Its Play in the AI/ML Market,” is available and says a SwiftStack reference architecture for AI/ML data management is backed by two customers. It includes Cisco servers and switches, NVIDIA’a DGX GPU servers and SwiftStack’s object storage software.
One customer uses NVIDIA DRIVE, an autonomous vehicle development platform using SwiftStack storage It supports 1OB of data per car per week with 30 cars being tested.
We’re told the SwiftStack software allows data transfer rates in excess of 100GB/sec, allowing GPU-based compute farms to stay busy.
Tsinghua Unigroup’s DRAM Fab
Chinese state enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is building a DRAM fab, having signed an agreement with the Chongqing government to establish an R&D centre and a wafer fab for DRAM production in Chongqing’s Liangjiang New Area.
Construction is scheduled finish in 2021. TrendForce reports Tsinghua has created a DRAM business unit with Diao Shijing, former director of MIIT, as the chairman and Charles Kao as the CEO.
According to TrendForce a major problem faced by this Tsinghua effort is DRAM fab process technology. It has no external partner that can provide the necessary expertise.
Shorts
ATTO Technology is now shipping the new ATTO ThunderLink 3252 Thunderbolt 3 to 25GbitE adapter. It is optimised for extremely low latency and high-bandwidth data transfers and features the industry’s lowest power consumption.
Cloud backup and DR supplier Carbonite has a new exec team after its $619m purchase of Webroot with its machine learning capabilities. John Post is the COO. Chad Bacher is Chief product Officer, Hal Lomas is the CTO. Anthony Folger remains as CFO as does CraigStilwell as Chief Revenue Officer
Tabor Communications has a report looking at the suitability of Ceph storage SW in high-performance computing. Download it with registration here.
Chelsio announced support of the SoftiWarp feature of Linux kernel 5.3 by its line of T5 and T6 line of Unified Wire 25/40/50/100 GbitE protocol offload adapters. SoftiWarp is an open source software implementation of the iWARP protocol suite developed by IBM Zurich Research.
With it Any L2 NIC can now run the iWARP protocol and leverage Ethernet RDMA networking. Download a technical brief here.
French MSP Asema has deployed Cohesity’s secondary data converging DataPlatform for its own and customers’ workloads. Its using Cohesity to offer storage and backup services, having originally used NetApp.
FileShadow provides a thin provisioned, secure and searchable cloud vault for individuals, SMBs and SMEs on Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops.
Free of the lawsuits against and from Sony, Fujifilm is now producing LTO-8 tape cartridges.
An IHS Markit report says the market for storage equipment certified by the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) is expected to more than double from 2019 to 2023 as vendors move to offer new products compliant with the organization’s standards. Global revenue for OCP storage products will expand to $5.4 billion in 2023, up from $2.5 billion in 2019, according to the Data Center Storage Equipment Market Tracker report.
Scale-out filer biz Qumulo, which ships an Active Archive Storage system product, has joined the Active Archive Alliance. It says it has built-in intelligent read/write cache to deliver the performance needed for billions of files accessed by hundreds, or even thousands, of users.
StorONE today has become a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). StorONE’s turnkey enterprise solution is built with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, for DevOps environments with containers and microservices. This allows cloud-native business applications and traditional workloads to run on a single storage infrastructure.
Scale-out filer startup Qumulo is partnering with axle ai, with its AI-driven video media management SW, to provide media and entertainment customers with a system for storing, managing, and automating search of their content.
Superfast parallel file software startup WekaIO has been awarded three patents;
10268378 for “congestion mitigation in a distributed storage system,”
10394490 for “flash registry with write levelling,”
10402093 for “congestion mitigation in a multi-tiered distributed storage system.”
It has an astounding 41 more patents pending.
An ESG tech evaluation report looks at Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage system. It’s downloadable with registration.
Digitimes reports China’s Yangtze Memory has started volume production of its 64-layer 3D NAND, fabricating 256Gbit TLC chips. The company is expected to grow its 64-layer 3D NAND flash output to 100,000-150,000 wafers monthly in 2020. It is developing a 128-layer capability.
Zstor now offers certified Azure Stack HCI solutions with the Mini Cubes as well as rack servers with the latest Xeon Scalable Gen2 CPU generation.
IDC has published a September storage tracker different from last year’s tracker, making overall enterprise storage market comparisons virtually impossible.
The tech analyst firm has put out a Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker that looks only at vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise external OEM storage systems market. Last year’s quarterly tracker report covered the total enterprise storage systems market. Now we just get a look at the external enterprise OEM storage systems market.
Also this latest quarterly tracker report’s numbers for the enterprise external OEM storage systems market are different from last year’s external enterprise storage systems market. Thank you, IDC.
This IDC enterprise external OEM storage systems market report tabulates the top five vendors’ results in the second 2019 quarter:
IDC’s headline points;
Vendor revenue decreased 0.8 per cent Y/Y to $6.3bn,
Capacity shipments in the external storage systems market rose 5.2 per cent Y/Y to 16.3 EB,
Capacity shipments in the total market (including ODMs and server-based storage) declined 4.2% to 107.9 EB,
Original design manufacturers (ODMs) revenue from hyperscale datacenters declined 22.9 per cent Y/Y to $4.2bn.
Sebastian Lagana, IDC research manager, said: “Second quarter results trended similarly to the first quarter with ODMs continuing to decline against a difficult year-over-year comparison and internal (server-based) storage weighed down by a contraction in the server market.
“While the external OEM segment was pressured by contraction in all-flash arrays, which has long been a growth driver for the segment, we did note end user investment in midrange SAN platforms remained strong, with nearly all OEMs generating growth in that portion of the market.”
Looking at the vendor numbers, HPE did very well, with a 13.5 per cent rise, overtaking NetApp. Leader Dell slid a little more than the market overall, still blowing everybody else away. It has more revenue in this market than HPE, NetApp and IBM combined.
IBM lost most percentage-wise, followed by NetApp. Hitachi grew nicely, gaining ground on IBM.
Did server SANs impact external shared storage sales? Capacity-wise, apparently not. Revenue-wise, maybe a little. As noted above IDC has not released a worldwide total enterprise storage systems market report for the quarter so we are unable to assess how server-based storage is doing relative to the external storage market.
Samsung has developed an open standard prototype key:value SSD and is working with Datrium, Minio, DDN’s Nexenta and others to productise it.
A key:value (KV) SSD implements an object-like storage scheme on the drive instead of reading and writing data blocks as requested by a host server or storage array controller. In effect the drive has an OTL, an Object Translation Layer, which converts between object KV pairs and the native blocks of the SDD.
A Samsung document states: “the Samsung Key Value SSD needs only standard SSD hardware, which is augmented by special Flash Translation Layer (FTL) software that provides its processing capabilities.“
Seagate pioneered the drive level KV store idea in 2015 with its Kinetic disk drives. These had an on-drive KV store and were directly addressed by hosts as Ethernet devices. They failed to grab customers and Seagate does not appear to sell them anymore.
The SNIA has published an open standard for a Key Value Application Programming Interface (KV API) which means that KV devices will be interchangeable between suppliers – unlike the Seagate Kinetic drive.
SNIA executive director Michael Oros said in a prepared statement: “The SNIA KV API specification… paves the way for widespread industry adoption of a standardised KV API protocol.”
Samsung is making large but unquantified claims for the proto drive. It will offer substantially greater scalability, unmatched durability and CPU-relieving functionality compared to existing SSDs. However, we don’t know the proto drive’s actual capacity, flash tech, performance, interface or its endurance.
It says there are many unstructured data applications, such as Ceph, Mongo DB and Reddis. When they use software-based KV stores on SSDs, they then handle flash garbage collection (deleting old data, etc.) in the host, affecting system performance. Samsung’s KV SSD does garbage collection itself, on the drive, like a traditional SSD’s flash translation layer, so the host servers should now go faster.
The Samsung document shows RocksDB running both on a standard system and a Samsung KV SSD system, which was considerably faster in terms of queries per second (QPS) and the amount of device IO and user IO:
RocksDB performance on Samsung KV SSD
Datrium’s chief scientist Hugh Patterson is enthused: “SNIA’s KV API is enabling a new generation of architectures for shared storage that is high-performance and scalable. Cloud object stores have shown the power of KV for scaling shared storage, but they fall short for data-intensive applications demanding low latency.
“The KV API has the potential to get the server out of the way in becoming the standard-bearer for data-intensive applications, and Samsung’s KV SSD is a groundbreaking step towards this future.”
Productisation is probably a 2020 story – and possibly the second half. We’ll watch for further details as they come out.
Toshiba has introduced 16TB versions of its N300 small office NAS and X300 PC/workstation disk drives, adding two extra TB to the existing products.
The company’s first 16TB drive, the helium-filled, 9-platter MG08, made its in January 2019, and gave it a two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) head to cope with the narrow tracks on the platter. Each read head has two readers, slightly offset from each other, to cancel out inter-track interference noise.
Toshiba TDMR diagram.
The N300 and X300 drives have a 512MiB cache, double that of their 14GB precursor but spin at the same 7,200rpm. Toshiba has not published a data sheet for these drives but we understand they feature the same 6Gbit/s SATA interface as the 14TB N300 and X300.
The N300 supports use in NAS chassis with up to 8 bays and has a 180TB/year workload rating, with 24×7 operation. It has a three-year warranty while the X300 makes do with two years. We do not know the sustained data transfer rate and that number wasn’t supplied for the MG08 either. Possibly it’s not that impressive.
The 14TB N300 did 260MB/sec so the 16TB version should be in that area or better.
Yesterday Western Digital announced 18TB and 20TB drives using microwave energy-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology. Toshiba is also developing MAMR technology. WD said its H550 18TB drive can be derated to 16TB but it has no pure 16TB drive offering.
The N300 and X300 should be available by the end of the year.
Scale Computing, the hyperconverged systems vendor, is OEMing Acronis Backup to add archiving and disaster recovery to its systems.
Scale’s HC3 includes a data protection suite which offers high-availability, backup, replication and recovery. It says many customers have augmented this to add protection features such as disaster recovery and support of NAS or SAN as target devices.
By OEMing Acronis Backup, Scale can now offer customers archiving, anti-ransomware and disaster recovery as well as Acronis’ backup facilities. These include supporting the public cloud and on-premises HC3 virtual disks, NAS and SAN as backup storage targets.
Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready said: “Our technologies are highly complementary, and HC3 customers…will also benefit from the performance, ROI and TCO advantages offered by Acronis Backup.”
Jeff Ready, Scale Computing CEO
Acronis Backup has full bare-metal systems recovery, meaning a backup image can be restored to a server minus an OS. It also has universal restore to the same or dissimilar hardware, as well as granular recovery levels from files and folders up through virtual machines to systems.
Blocks & Files thinks the Scale-Acronis tie-in may prompt other hyperconverged system vendors, such as Cisco, DataCore, and Pivot3 to offer similar deals integrating data protection, archiving and DR into their offerings.
Datrium already offers disaster recovery and NetApp teams up with Veeam with its Elements HCI product. HPE has RapidDR for its SimpliVity HCI system.
Dell EMC’s VxRail hyperconverged system includes backup and replication, with RecoverPoint, Avamar-based vSphere Data Protection and optional Data Domain for deduplicated backup and recovery. It also has Cloud Array which supports backups stored on the public cloud.
Acronis Backup is available for purchase from Scale Computing today.
Commvault is buying Hedvig, a software-defined storage startup, for $225m.
This is a bet on data unification and operational efficiency by Commvault, which cites a Gartner forecast that software-defined storage (SDS) running in the cloud will become the dominant method of building multi-cloud storage infrastructures by 2023.
Hedvig CEO and co-founder Avinash Lakshman said operational efficiency is achieved “via complete protocol consolidation (block, file, and object storage) on a single API-driven platform,” that spans geographies and multiple clouds, and covers primary and secondary storage. This is what Hedvig’s Universal Data Plane software, running on AWS, Azure and the Google cloud, provides.
Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said: “Hedvig’s technology is in its prime. It has been market tested and proven. We believe that the convergence of storage, multi cloud, and cloud native technologies, combined with our leadership in data management will accelerate the movement towards modern applications built on containers and microservices. Commvault will set the bar for the unification of storage and data management for the future.”
The data management vendor says businesses face data fragmentation with data reposing in multiple public clouds as well as on-premises. Data comes from different sources; on-premises and public clouds, virtualized and containerised servers and IoT devices. And it is stored in different formats; block, file and object.
Avinash Lakshman (left) and Sanjay Mirchandani (right)
Hedvig was founded in 2012 by Avinash Lakshman and his brother, VP of engineering Srinivas Lakshman. Total funding is $52m.
All Hedvig’s staff join Commvault and stay in their Santa Clara HQ, five minutes walk from Commvault’s office there.
The Commvault and Hedvig software products will continue to be sold stand-alone and a roadmap is being developed to bring them together.
This is Commvault’s first acquisition under the helm of Mirchandani, who was appointed in February, and it marks a change of direction for the company which hitherto has focused on organic growth.
The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth 2019 quarter.
AIOps is a Gartner-supported concept of performance and infrastructure monitoring.
AIOps
AIOps stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations and entails collecting performance data from applications and the IT infrastructure (system software, compute, storage, network) they use. This is analysed using machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems to automatically detect and respond to issues in real time. The ultimate goal is self-driving applications and data centres.
Gartner AIOPs diagram.
Performance monitoring suppliers that used to look at infrastructure components such as network gear or storage kit, and others that looked at applications are now having to look at the whole application-infrastructure stack. The goal is to develop integrated offerings that use machine learning because human analysis is too difficult and slow for real time responses to issues.
HPE is developing InfoSight to cover the whole data centre, and its recent Primera array includes InfoSight AI models which predict application performance using an on-board AI workload fingerprinting and headroom analysis engine.
VMware’s Project Magna is also developing a self-tuning capability with hyperconverged systems’ vSAN as its testbed.
To further its AIOps ambitions Virtual Instruments has released v6.2 of the VirtualWisdom app and infrastructure performance management software.
VirtualWisdom v6.2
VW v6.2 discovers and maps applications to the infrastructure, to monitor a whole app stack’s performance as it relates to an SLA. It applies real-time, AI-based analytics through an updated Wisdom AI engine. It’s said to work across hybrid data centres, meaning ones on-premises and in the public cloud.
The release includes Dell EMC Isilon integrationm with more than 1500 metrics collected at 10-second intervals, and several other new features;
Workload RightSizer – rightsizes VMs by scaling them up or down across an application, with settable policies for the amount of CPU and memory for each VM, host or cluster.
Workload Drift Analyser – real-time alerts when application workload behaviour is anomalous or is the root-cause of observed performance issues.
Predictive Capacity Management – Monitors, reports, forecasts and alarms against the capacity consumption rate with settable time period alerts before capacity exhaustion.
There was a supporting quote from Bob Laliberte, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group; “Infrastructure issues must be resolved in near real-time to avoid impacting the business and its customers.”
Virtual Instruments CEO Philippe Vincent put out a prepared quote: “The future of IT operations is autonomous.”
VW v6.2 is not there yet but it is a little closer to delivering autonomy.
Our take
Blocks & Files thinks Virtual Instruments will need to partner with system vendors such as HPE and VMware, to integrate Virtual Wisdom with HPE’s InfoSight and VMware’s Project Magna so as to offer a heterogeneous AIOps capability.
Neither HPE’s nor VMware’s offerings will have the ability to look at third party-supplied app infrastructure components and that’s where Virtual Instruments and other external suppliers will be able to offer a helping hand.
Western Digital has announced 18 and 20TB disk drives using a partial microwave-assisted magnetic (MAMR) recording technology implementation (ePMR). Sample shipments are due by the end of the year.
The path is now clear for WD to lift disk capacity to 40TB and beyond.
The Ultrastar data centre DC HC550 is a helium-filled drive in 16TB and 18TB versions. It uses either 8 or 9 platters and has conventionally recorded tracks. The drive implements a form of energy-enhanced perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) which has not been explained.
The 20TB DC HC650 has 9 platters and uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR), with zones of partially overlapping tracks, to cram in an extra 2TB of capacity over the HC550.
9-platter HC550/650 internals. Note the solid actuator hinge anchor to the left.
Current PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology is reaching an areal density limit as the bit areas become too small to sustain a stable magnetic polarity. MAMR uses a more stable recording medium which can sustain smaller bit areas. But writing data now involves beaming microwave energy at the bit area to enable the magnetic polarity to be set by the read/write head.
Christopher Bergey, SVP and GM of WD Data Center Devices, told us in a briefing that WD has a 4-model range of data centre drives:
The HC330 is the only 10TB air-filled drive with as few as six platters. Bergey said 14TB drives hit the market sweet spot, citing TrendFocus research saying that will be the dominant capacity point through to mid-2020.
WD also has a 15TB HC620 which uses shingling but there is no pure 16TB drive in this list. Toshiba has a 16TB drive in its lineup as does Seagate with the 16TB Exos. Bergey said WD is skipping the 16TB level to progress straight to these 18 and 20TB capacity drives.
Shingled drives rule over flash
The company believes its host-managed SMR drives will become popular, and estimates half of its disk drive exabytes shipped will be on SMR by 2023.
Bergey said demand for high-capacity data centre disk drives will be sustained for several years. In other word they will not be washed away by SSDs using quad level cell or penta level cell flash. WD pointed to TrendFocus estimates of disk drive exabyte shipments to grow 36 per cent annually between 2018- 2023..
Also, WD cites Joseph Unsworth, Research VP at Gartner, who said, “In data centres, lower capacity/mission critical HDDs are increasingly being replaced by flash/SSD technology, however, the nearline capacity business critical HDD technology maintains a considerable advantage in ASP/GB. NAND Flash/SSD technology still has a long way to go to even reach 3X the ASP/GB so we still see a long-term (post-2030) opportunity for these capacity HDDs.”
HC330 and HC530 drives are available now. WD will sample the HC650 and HC550 drives to select customers by the end of the year, with qualification and volume shipments beginning in the first half of 2020. In other words volume ships of these drives are about nine months away.
