• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / Where Are the Ultra-Dense Arrays?

Where Are the Ultra-Dense Arrays?

December 13, 2007 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Chris Evans’ posting about the lack of 2.5″ Enterprise Arrays got me thinking. About two years ago, I predicted that the 2.5″ form factor would make a significant entry in the enterprise space as a way to bring performance (in the form of more spindles) to the enterprise storage array world. I reiterated this in August when examining the world of enterprise hard drives. So where are these “small form factor” (SFF) arrays?

While you can already buy an amazing miniature RAID array that fits in a 5.25″ drive bay, and 2.5″ drives are seeing widespread use in blades and other compact servers, there isn’t much noise among enterprise array makers about the topic. About the only enterprise makers are Infortrend, ProStor, and HP.

Infortrend trumpeted the “world’s first external SFF array” in October, so at least they were pretty sure no one else sells one. But HP might beg to differ – their MSA70 shipped at the end of last year, supporting up to 25 SFF drives in 2U. They also apparently offer a 20-drive SFF shelf for other MSA systems, but I haven’t seen one.

Finally there’s ProStor with their cool RDX removable disk cartridges for backup. I’d love to see the TCO for these, but there are probably some enterprise users out there.

Like Chris, though, I’ve never seen these things outside a trade show. Is anyone using them? Or are we right in supposing that the weight, power, and heat issues associated with multiplying drive spindles offsets their performance advantages?

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Enterprise storage Tagged With: 2.5" drives, HP, Infortrend, MSA70, ProStor, SFF, small form factor

Primary Sidebar

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Steve Jobs

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Put that camera away and enjoy the view!

    April 11, 2012

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    A Watch Guy’s Review of the Apple Watch

    April 27, 2015

    What’s the Deal with Containers?

    October 21, 2016

    What is VMware VASA? Not Much (Yet)

    November 11, 2011

    On the Death of Innovation, or “These Kids These Days!”

    May 21, 2012

    Scaling Storage At The Client

    November 25, 2013

    MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!

    December 20, 2012

    Debit or Credit? Always Choose Credit!

    December 19, 2013

    The Rack Endgame: A New Storage Architecture For the Data Center

    September 3, 2014

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 ยท Log in