The relentless march of hard drive capacity is about to reach its next cantonment as 500 GB 2.5″ drives begin to arrive this month. These little half-terabyte wonders will continue the downward pressure on price and challenge flash-based drives just as they stake their claim in the main stream of the market. Continue Reading »
I’ve been working on a new whitepaper for Hitachi focused on privacy laws in the United States and Europe, and what we mere storage folks can do to help comply with them. It’s pretty amazing stuff - the American system is totally different from the European, no surprise. Where they have sweeping top-down rights to privacy and consistent standards, we have bottom-up point laws, a patchwork of state laws, and self-regulation. I tell you, as someone who cares about privacy (and avoiding identity theft and credit fraud), it makes me want to move to Europe!
But seriously, without scooping the paper (which I’ll link to when it’s published), if you’re interested in learning more about privacy laws, I highly recommend the Privacy Journal’s Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws, pictured at right. It’s $31, and loaded with data. Also, check out the Electronic Privacy Information Center web site, another excellent source of information!
It seems that water-cooled storage isn’t just for IBM spinoffs anymore! NEC and Hitachi have unveiled a new water-cooled hard drive module for PCs (in Japan) to keep their drives nice and cool (and quiet, too!)
Don’t expect to see this tech widely used, though. It’s way too complex for mainstream application.
Once again, in the words of Mystery Science Theater 3000, “Trumpy, you can do stupid things!”
Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial SCSI, Fibre Channel, and even SATA.
Lots of innovation is currently on the horizon in the enterprise drive space, notably the application of desktop and mobile technologies to the space. Right now, you can buy a 15,000 RPM 2.5″ dual-SAS enterprise mechanism from two different companies! Or maybe you want a 1 TB bulk drive with SATA? These are a far cry from the bread and butter 10- and 15k 3.5″ SCSI and FC drives we’ve long been accustomed to. Click through for the full story… Continue Reading »
I will begin my overview of the specialized hard drive market with the ubiquitous desktop disk drive. While just about any drive could be used in a desktop computer, the class is generally defined by what it lacks - compact size, power efficiency, exotic interfaces, special drive features, and high performance are all generally not required.
My survey did reveal a surprising range of devices, even given these limited requirements. Although no 5400 RPM drives are currently being sold for desktop use, there is (one) 10,000 RPM desktop drive! And a few of the larger drives are showing up with mondo caches - up to e32 MB! I bet these cache sizes will put the squeeze on hybrid drives…
Really, desktop drives are mostly notable for what they are doing to the enterprise market, which I’ll cover tomorrow. But for now, click through for the full story on the desktop drive market!
Lately, there has been a lot of buzz in the enterprise storage arena about whether so-called “enterprise drives” are really any better than plain-Jane hard drives in Enterprise applications. This came to a head with the controversial findings of Google and CMU, but it’s been simmering under the covers everywhere from TiVo communities to gamers. I’ve normally been loathe to focus on a product so mundane as a hard disk unit in this blog, but I find that their functionality ripples up to the highest levels of strategic buying.
So what makes a great hard disk drive? It turns out that the major manufacturers have a lot of ideas, segmenting and specializing their product lines faster than anyone can keep up with it. I realized that I really knew very little about these important components and set out to learn more.
So all next week, I’m going to highlight each segment of the hard disk industry, discussing the various models of drives offered and the reality of their specialization.
I’ll be looking at drives from the following manufacturers:
And I’ll be covering the following market segments:
At the end, I’ll sum up my findings and opinions on this amazingly diverse market. Note that, while I focus on enterprise data storage as a professional consultant, I’m no disk drive market insider. I’m researching and learning, and I value input from others, especially on this topic!
H3C already has a long list of products, most based on in-house hardware and OEM software. On the storage side, the company makes an iSCSI storage array platform dubbed “Neocean”. This storage platform, selling strongly in China, is alleged to leverage technology licensed from FalconStor (on the low-end IX1000), Intransa (on the bigger IX5000), as well as iVivity and Xyratex. OEM storage developer Ciprico today announced that it will be working with H3C on the next generation. H3C also sells a WAFS accelerator leveraging Expand Networks software. All of these should be coming to the United States next year.
Huawei itself is also getting back into the storage market in the form of a joint venture with Symantec, creatively called Huawei-Symantec. This company is set to be coming out with a line of network devices with Veritas-based software built in. We’re hearing about virus scanning and content indexing appliances, as well as NAS and SAN arrays which will include storage foundation software from Symantec right out of the box.
Who knows what’s next from Huawei? I’d guess expanded services, more resellers in the West, and more OEM deals to create bigger systems. In a few years, they might give Hitachi and EMC trouble in the enterprise market, especially when big server vendors like Sun, SGI, Dell, and HP start rethinking their OEM strategies…
Hu Yoshida speculated in his blog that most folks would rather outsource their home media storage than keep terabytes of storage in their home. Sure, he was speaking for HDS, which has no home storage ambitions, but I respect him and can understand his point. I already outsource my personal email because I can get better features, access, and reliability that way. But there’s no way I would outsource my media, and this is the real storage king in my multi-terabyte home.
Back in the 1990’s, I marveled at the fact that every PC I bought had more storage than all others I had ever owned, combined. But then came the Nomad Jukebox and its hard drive hack and suddenly my portable personal music player had more storage than everything I owned. My AT&TiVo easily eclipsed that, especially once I added a second drive. And the majority of the 320 GB in my home PC is used for media files too. My new HD TiVo promises to soon become the first terabyte-in-a-box computer in my house.
My Shared Items Enterprise Storage at FriendFeed
