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?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Pillar First To Put Faith In 2 TB Enterprise Drives
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But the era of the 2 TB enterprise hard disk drive is not quite here yet. It is not clear which Xyratex-made products will support the massive drive since the company is an OEM supplier, but IBM ought to be on the list. Once a vendor announces product, it could take months for these monster arrays to ship.

One issue with these massive drives is RAID protection. These massive drives must be protected with dual-parity RAID-6 or similar. Although drive capacity has been growing, transfer speed has not kept up: A 2 TB drive, running at full speed, would take upwards of 10 hours to rebuild its contents, an unacceptably-long window for a single-parity RAID-5 setup.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | 2 TB Enterprise Drives Are Here?
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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…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Storage from behind the great wall
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