Pillar First To Put Faith In 2 TB Enterprise Drives

Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Stephen in Enterprise storage

That didn’t take long! Just two weeks ago, Xyratex announced that they would support Hitachi Global Storage’s 2 TB enterprise hard disk drives. We wondered at the time which OEM would be the first to ship such massive drives, and our question is answered today. Pillar Data announced today that they are now supplying 2 TB enterprise disk drives. But Pillar is going with Western Digital’s impressive RE4-GP rather than the 5-platter Hitachis.

It would have made more sense if a vendor of fully-automated integrated tiered storage arrays was the first: Although Western Digital impressed me and others with these big drives, they aren’t going to be speed demons. Pillar suggests that they can make effective use of this capacity without killing overall performance thanks to their QoS technology and the ability to mix drive types in the same frame, but this isn’t the same as the granular, dynamic tiering some vendors offer.

Who will be next? And when will it be Hitachi GST’s turn in the sun?

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Tags: Hitachi GST, Pillar, RE4-GP, tiered storage, Western Digital, Xyratex

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mikeworkman

Stephen - The Axiom is designed to handle lots of classes of storage. Just as before, when the 5-Platter Hitachi's are available with 7200 RPM spindles I am sure our customers will make these a mainstay as they did the Hitachi 1TB drives. What we try to do is make options available to our customers as soon as we can. As you know, some applications allow the tradeoff of lower power for higher latency. Since this is what our QoS is all about - tradeoffs or tiering in the box - we use it.

Regarding the "faith" - not really. Our drives are fitted to a carrier which dual ports them, we build them into very small 5+1+1HS RAID groups. I love drives, and I spent 20 years developing them, but they have moving parts: No faith allowed. Lot's of engineering (hardware and firmware) surrounding these puppies to ensure data availability.

Thanks,

MIke

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat