Enterprise Storage Forum posted a recent story titled, “Top 10 Technologies That Remain the Backbone of Storage.” These are the unsung heroes… they are the unhyped…some may be technologies you thought were dying… but they are in fact the technologies that run the world’s data, and therefore they are the technologies that remain hugely valuable and necessary.

Writer Drew Robb gathered the insights of respected storage authority Greg Shulz, analyst with the Server and StorageIO group for the story.

Take a look at the list, which includes specific devices and related technologies (e.g., hard drives as well as Fibre Channel made the list), as well as process technologies and tools (RAID, backup/restore, etc.). Do you agree with them? I know I was surprised personally to see a few of the technologies that made it to this list.

Author: Inside IT Storage @ Seagate

Cloud computing has been the talk of the industry for well over the past year, generating buzz and debate that’s filled the pages of the tech news media. And one can certainly see why there’s so much excitement. The idea of hosted storage solutions in the cloud brings with it the promise of saving organizations money by reducing in-house staff, company real estate, and equipment costs.

And in today’s challenging economy, what company isn’t focused on the bottom line?

Network World wrote an interesting story on cloud computing recently, arguing that the model itself is really nothing new, and in fact brings up the argument of some critics who claim that cloud computing, “is just an attempt to resurrect the mainframe and thin computing,” according to the story.

Author Kerrie Meyler also cites examples of shared/leasing of third party computing services that date back to the 1962! Even General Electric offered “time sharing” services beginning in 1968 through its GEISCO subsidiary for unused mainframe computing cycles. It’s an intelligent and interesting parallel perspective to the cloud computing debate, which may indeed deflate some of the hype.

But in the end, Meyler’s argument about cloud computing not being very new as a model after all, may in fact be just what people need to hear in order to fully embrace the cloud. The fact that the model itself is “time tested” as the article states, may ultimately help provide the reassurance and comfort to drive cloud computing’s success. Change, as we know when it comes to the world of computing infrastructures, can be slow and difficult. But who knows if this thinking will change as people begin to understand that the concept has been with us for decades? Perhaps the old saying, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” might someday even be translated and applied to buying and using cloud-based services.

The original post is created by: Inside IT Storage @ Seagate

SearchStorage recently wrote a feature titled, “6Gbps SAS drives signal end of line for Fibre Channel disk drives.”

Depending on how deeply entrenched you may be within your own enterprise, this may or may not be a surprise to you.  After all, Fibre Channel has a huge installed drive base in the largest enterprise systems worldwide. Does it make sense to make the cut now and force a change to SAS? What about all of those legacy systems?

Fortunately for the support needs of these large enterprises, Seagate isn’t abandoning the Fibre Channel interface just yet. Drives will continue to be built with this interface as long as Seagate’s OEM customers require and ask for them. And certainly we also understand an IT team’s point of view that taking an existing Fibre-based infrastructure and making upgrades using higher-capacity Fibre Channel drives over time is much easier to manage, as well as being more cost-effective, than gutting an entire system and starting from scratch.

But if we’re talking about newly created systems from the ground up, then we do expect those enterprise infrastructures to largely be based on SAS drives. Indeed, SAS has been a hit as it truly is considered very much a “best of breed” drive interface by IT teams – SAS takes many of the key benefits found in both Fibre Channel and SCSI and merges them together.

In the old Fibre Channel vs. SCSI days, the advantages of Fibre Channel for use in a large enterprise was clear. It allowed for significantly longer cable distances and device connections (Approximately 10 Kilometers/6 Miles and 16 million drives for Fibre vs. only about 12 Meters/40 Feet and 16 drives for SCSI at one point in history!). Communication between multiple servers was also a distinct advantage with Fibre Channel. Now, SAS – at the drive level – brings better connectivity than parallel SCSI ever could, and in fact is faster than Fibre Channel running at 6Gbps versus Fibre’s 4Gbps.

But the key to this discussion is really that of Fibre Channel’s use at the drive level as a native interface. For Storage Area Networks among other applications “outside-the-box”, Fibre Channel clearly rules – by kilometers/miles – for connectivity length and this is why it likely won’t be going extinct in those environments. Fibre Channel also currently runs at 8Gb/s speeds (a.k.a. 8GFC) as the standard. So of course, while we’re on the topic of outside-of-the-box connectivity, we could easily lead into yet another discussion about others contending for the thrown: perhaps iSCSI as a start? What about the role of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)?

But before we move into that discussion, maybe this is the best place to end in order to get your thoughts: Which interface do you see dominating SANs and virtualized environments in the years ahead and why? Let us know what you think.

Go here to see the original: Inside IT Storage @ Seagate

Seagate’s Constellation ES 2TB drives have been making the rounds through the review sites this month, earning praise and awards along the way. Many of the benchmark results even surprised a few of these reviewers, who wrote of the Constellation being able to hold its ground against normally faster 10K-rpm drives and even Solid State Drives in some tests!

Bjorn3D was the first to report on the all-new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) version of the Constellation drive that was attached to an LSI 3Ware SAS RAID controller. “The Seagate Constellation ES 2TB 6Gb/s drives are very capable lightning fast drives,” said Bjorn’s Review Director Mark Taliaferro. “Single drive, we saw amazing speeds in our normal benchmarks, then we increased the benchmark payload sizes to incredibly massive sizes and performance was still high.”

Taliaferro awarded the Constellation ES SAS drive with Bjorn’s “Golden Bear Award” and gave it a 9.5/10 rating. He concluded the story with thoughts on both the drives and controller. “From our experience with hard drives, even 10k RPM drives, we haven’t seen performance this good from many drives. We certainly haven’t seen 10k drives with this storage capacity. In any case the performance of the LSI 3Ware SAS 9750-4i 6Gb/s RAID Card and Seagate Constellation ES drives was eye popping. No matter single drive, 2xRAID0, 3xRaid0 or RAID5, performance was high. High enough to make you rethink SSD lust and that’s high enough for us.”

This month, Fudzilla also published its own review of the Constellation ES drive. This time they chose to focus on the SATA version.

Reviewer Jon Worrell stated, “Seagate has once again delivered a very robust and highly reliable storage solution with its fourth-generation Constellation ES series drives. With an engineering ethic built around providing exceptional enterprise-oriented sustainability for high-volume database centers around the world, we were presented these drives under the assumption that they would be the absolute best-in-class for reliability measures.”

Worrell then added, “Indeed, they delivered on this promise and went beyond our expectations by providing incredible RAID 0 performance that we were not expecting to see.”

Fudzilla concluded their story by honoring the Constellation ES with its Top Value Award for 2010.

A number of other reviewers offered additional praise for the Constellation family…

LinuxLookup said, “Over all, Seagate makes some of the best storage products on the planet and the Constellation series is well worth your purchase.” X-bit Labs stated, “The Seagate Constellation is a nice surprise to us. It is a really good server-oriented HDD with firmware optimized for server loads and with rather fast heads…” And HotHardware put the Constellation ES on to its “HotHardware Recommended” list.

Constellation HDDs are making a strong impression with reviewer communities for their performance, capacity, and storage value for the enterprise/nearline segments. How will other reviewers respond to the Constellation ES, especially with the all-new SAS version running at 6Gb/s speeds? We certainly look forward to finding out and hope to report more about this award-winning drive in the near future.

Author: Inside IT Storage @ Seagate

There’s good news out there for enterprise storage growth and consumption. Gartner recently reported that during the first quarter of 2010, the worldwide external controller-based disk storage market grew 18.3 percent over the same period last year.

What drove that growth? Much of it was attributed to the need to refresh outdated storage infrastructures. When the economy began its slump, IT budgets were reduced and purchase decision were put on hold. The fact that spending has begun again is a good sign for our industry in general.

In fact, Gartner’s report indicated that every global market and region, except for Japan, showed double-digit growth when examining the data year-over-year. North America’s growth even topped the worldwide figure, at a rate of 25.5 percent.

So who were the big storage winners? EMC topped the list for highest revenue of 1.2B for 1Q10, while NetApp could be listed in the “most improved” category for year-over-year growth showing an increase of nearly 45%. IBM took the number two spot though overall for revenue, while HP and Dell weren’t too far behind, and all still held double-digit growth rates. Certainly all five of these makers can be congratulated and viewed as winners during the strong first quarter of 2010.

Original post created by: Inside IT Storage @ Seagate

I came across this article on InformationWeek “Expanding Role of Data Deduplication,” and I thought I would share it. InformationWeek created a survey of 437 technology professionals and picked their brains regarding the technology of dedupe and how they might be using it within their infrastructures. The report is available free for a limited time here: http://dedupe.informationweek.com/

This report gives a solid overview of dedupe and how it relates to the overall storage market, its very detailed and I would encourage anyone interested in dedupe to download it and give it a read. Cheers!

Original post: Online Storage Optimization

As @storagebod (Martin Glassborow) noted today in a blog post, the issue of protecting deduplicated data is an important one for any business.

Deduplication and other data reduction technologies offer the opportunity for increased data protection at a reduced cost.

When you hit a threshold of 50% or greater overall data reduction, it lowers the cost of performing a a full mirror of data. For example, if you have 100 terabytes of data, mirroring today would require 200 terabytes of disk space. But if the data were reduced by 75%, you could store the same data in 25 terabytes, and full mirroring would require on 50 terabytes of disk – a significant savings. In other words, it is possible to fully protect your storage, including full mirroring, with less disk than it takes to store the unprotected data today.

While this is true with any amount of space savings, when that level of savings goes beyond 50% (or a dedupe ratio of 2:1 or better), the storage cost of full mirroring is zero.

There are a number of options that your deduplication provider should be pursuing to compliment your data protection strategy. For example, a vendor should be able to allow you do two key things with your dedupe configuration:

1. Allow a minimum level of duplicate blocks to accumulate prior to starting deduplication. For example, you could allow data to be written twice, and then deduplicate all subsequent occurances. So long as the dedupe solution is aware of both original occurances, you have a form of mirroring without needing to do full mirroring at the disk level. Call this duplicate mirroring.
2. Set a threshold for a maximum number of duplicates. To set a maximum level of exposure on the loss of physical disk, you should be able to ask that once you have found ‘n’ instances of the block, to start over. You could set that number at 8, 32, 128 or whatever frequency makes business sense to you, and therefore, the potential loss of the sector on which the duplicate is stored would only affect a certain number of files.

These two examples are not necessarily a complete answer in and of themselves, but they do provide guidance for tools you can work with as part of an overall data protection strategy. As deduplication becomes a storage fundamental, and is in place across multiple tiers of storage and on multiple products in your data center, understanding the impact of dedupe on your data protection strategy will be key and your dedupe vendor should be providing you the right tools to manage that.

The original is here: Online Storage Optimization

Technorati Tags: Data Recovery, Data Recovery Software, Hard Drive Recovery

The original is here: Gottageta Recovery

Technorati Tags: Data Recovery, Data Recovery Software, Hard Drive Recovery

The original post is created by: Gottageta Recovery

Often we receive the question, “What are the differences between desktop and enterprise drives?” That same person may in fact also be thinking, “Can I use those lower-cost desktop drives in an enterprise environment?”

Seagate engineers design and test enterprise-class drives including Seagate Savvio and Cheetah 15K-rpm families under different stress conditions than desktop drives. Nearline enterprise drives including Seagate Constellation and Constellation ES are also tested under enterprise conditions. All of these drives must be able to operate in 24 x 7 environments, whereas desktop drives (e.g. Barracuda XT) are designed and tested typical 40-hour work week conditions. Additionally, enterprise-class drives must also maintain high performance levels in multi-drive configurations where physical vibrations transmitted through a cabinet occur. This phenomenon is known as Rotational Vibration (RV). Gizmodo recently wrote about a vendor-sponsored study on vibration, although we should note that Seagate enterprise class drives perform quite differently then what’s shown in Gizmodo’s story.

RV itself is a twisting/torqing type action experienced by a hard drive inside a cabinet. RV is measured in radians as the angular rate of change in seconds – in other words, it’s how much angular acceleration movement the drive can handle.

The main sources of RV energy are: 1) the drive’s self-actuation 2) additional drives inside the cabinet accessing data, and 3) external forces acting on the cabinet. If RV is not taken into account in the design of the drive, the force of RV can push the head off track causing missed revolutions and delays in data transfers.  Tests on drives not capable of handling RV have shown significant reductions (over 50%) in performance.

Fortunately, Seagate enterprise drives have used numerous technologies within its drives for over a decade to negate the effects of RV. To optimize these densely packed, multi-drive environments, Seagate uses RV sensors as well as linear vibration sensors on its enterprise drives. These sensors enable the drive to compensate for any vibration that occurs from the drive itself or outside of the drive (e.g. cooling fans, poorer-quality chassis, etc.) and still continue to read/write data.

It’s also a good idea by design to reduce the amount of vibration that a drive may generate on its own. Seagate’s larger capacity enterprise drives are built using a Top-Cover-Attach spindle motor that increases rigidity within any drive that uses a 4-disk configuration. Further enhancements of the design are made by optimizing the seek profiles of the drives in firmware to minimize any emitted torque.

And what about our question of using desktop drives in an enterprise environment? The diagram below shows the performance impact of desktop, nearline, and enterprise class drives at different vibration levels. The 6, 12, and 21.5 radians/sec^2 figures represent the specific tolerances of desktop, nearline, and enterprise-class drives respectively in maintaining throuput performance of least 80%. Notice that when the RV’s increase beyond those specified tolerances, the performance of the desktop drives in particular drops dramatically, while the enterprise-class drives maintain their performance at nearly 100% under all but the most extreme conditions.  Nearline-class enterprise drives like Seagate’s Constellation fall somewhere in between desktop and enterprise.

The bottom line: customers with multi-drive applications will benefit greatly from actually achieving the specified performance levels made available by integrating Seagate enterprise-class drives. Not all drives are created equal.

The original post is created by: Inside IT Storage @ Seagate