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The real story behind Seagate’s Constellation ES 2TB

Seagate_Constellation_ES_6Gb_SASYesterday, Seagate announced availability of it’s 4th generation enterprise nearline drive (Constellation ES) with up to 2TB of capacity.

The 2TB milestone on this drive is not necessarily the headline grab.  The real story with Constellation ES is the 6Gb SAS interface.  For the past few years, Seagate and others have worked to transition the enterprise market from SCSI and Fibre Channel to SAS, and by in large the transition has been a success, except for the burgeoning market for low cost nearline storage solutions that utilize SATA drives.

Seagate hopes to change that. Leading the way, Seagate brought 3Gb SAS to the nearline space with the previous 3.5-inch version Barracuda ES2, and it’s 2.5-inch brother Constellation. Today, the envelope gets pushed further with Constellation ES boasting twice the interface speed with 6Gb SAS.   Of course, Constellation ES is also available in a  SATA 3Gb version, but judging from Seagate’s announcement, 6Gb SAS is more ready for primetime in the nearline space and thus first to market.

Perhaps the enterprise ecosystem is just not ready to take advantage of SATA 6Gb. All that work transitioning the market to SAS has paid off. The market is conditioned to take advantage of 6Gb SAS today, and once again, Seagate is attempting to lead the way.

I am not going to go into the virtues of SAS over SATA. You can get that here.

Instead, let’s bring light to the real story here… Seagate wants the market to go  SAS.   It’s just a matter of time before the others sing the same tune.

Related Posts

Seagate Constellation is much more than 2TB
SAS gains steam with Dell PowerVault
The SAS 6Gb/s ecosystem is here. Where are you?
SAS 6Gb/s drives are a worthy compliment to SSD
Virtualization is a killer app for 6Gb/s  SAS

February 23, 2010 - 10:13 am | By Mark Wojtasiak | Posted in Business Storage, IT Storage, Servers, Storage Systems, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Seagate Pulsar: the first enterprise-ready SSD

PulsarIt’s official!  Seagate’s new SSD is called Pulsar, and is shipping to enterprise OEMs.  Pulsar is targeted at the enterprise blade server and general server market. 

Pulsar is the first truly enterprise-ready SSD from the world’s leader in enterprise storage devices.

The specs you might expect:

  • Up to 200 Gigabytes
  • SLC technology
  • 3 Gb/s SATA interface
  • Improved IOPS per Watt (vs. hard drives)
  • 2.5″ form factor with 7mm height

These make a lot of sense given the needs of today’s enterprise server market – 3Gb/s SATA, 2.5″, etc.  The 7mm height provides some great density opportunites for blade server manufacturers in particular. 

It is the first of many SSD strorage devices from Seagate.

The specs that make Pulsar uniquely enterprise-ready:

  • Stable data rate performance across the device’s multi-year useful life
  • Power Loss Protection – logic to protect data in volatile buffers long enough to write to non-volatile memory at power loss
  • Balanced perfomance between reads and writes
  • 0.44% Annual Failure Rate (AFR) in enterprise applications
  • 5 year warranty

SSD is not just flash media.  Extensive pre- and post-sales support is needed for true enterprise drives. Pulsar’s enterprise-ready capabilities come from Seagate storage device IP applied to solid state media and validated with extensive testing that enterprise customers require. 

For example, Power Loss Protection – achieved by the integration of a super-capacitor in Pulsar’s data architecture - protects enerprise data, enabling customers to use Pulsar with the write cache enabled. 

“Where’s Seagate?”

Some in the industry have been asking “Where’s Seagate?” as other companies have launched SSD products into the enterprise market over the past year or so. 

The answer is “In the lab and meeting with customers, building a true enterprise SSD.”

December 8, 2009 - 6:02 am | By Pete Steege | Posted in SSD, Servers, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (14)

New videos from Seagate: The Two-Minute Drill

 

We’ve had a lot of requests for more real-world insight on how to pick a drive.  There are so many choices today – how does one know which drive to use for which application?

We’ve responded with a new video series called The Two-Minute Drill. These videos each feature a Seagate product expert and focus on how to select a disk drive for a particular topic – all in less than two minutes. For example, here’s Joni Clark explaining what a 7200 rpm drive does for a notebook PC.

You can see the library of videos by viewing any one on the product pages of seagate.com – for example, this video of Ian Williams explaining SAS on the Savvio page.

Take look, and let us know what you think. 

What storage topic would you like us to cover next?

August 21, 2009 - 1:32 pm | By Pete Steege | Posted in Desktop PC, Products, Servers, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

IBM, Sun and Cisco in a word: comm-puting

ciscologo01

Thanks to Om Malik for netting out the dramatic changes in the IT industry this week.  He sees Sun ceding their “The Network is the Computer” vision to Cisco, who can actually make it happen.  He coined the term “comm-puter” for this disruptive change in high-end computing. 

Turns out making the network the computer is easier for network companies than computer companies.

IBM and Sun will take a run at it too, it seems.  What an amazing Dance of the Elephants we will see over the next few years!  Many companies must now decide between the dance floor and wall flower.

GigaOm’s view is that Dell and those lower on the mega-data center food chain won’t be as dramatically affected.  Does HP need another dance partner? 

While the Commputer Dance affects storage, it seems less direct.  Storage remains a core foundational element.  It’s kind of at the end of the network – the place all the stuff resides. 

Marc Farley’s collection of the latest news on the Cisco deal is handy as well.

March 19, 2009 - 5:34 am | By Pete Steege | Posted in Cloud Storage, Data Center, Servers, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Cisco to enter the server market

ciscologo01Virtualization is opening the door for Cisco to expand dramatically in the data center.

Cisco is moving into HP, IBM and Sun’s market turf in a way that they may not be able to easily reciprocate. 

Is it that easy to become a player in the server market?  Clearly Cisco is a respected name in IT.  But Cisco has been making moves in the storage market for years that have not resulted in significant presence beyond storage networking.  

Storage and servers are like Venus and Mars though, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Servers are arguably the crown jewels of the data center. Expect to see a Battle Royale over the next few years as the IT titans figure things out.

January 20, 2009 - 8:14 am | By Pete Steege | Posted in Companies, Data Center, IT Storage, Servers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Will Cisco enter the server business?

Servers would give them the third leg of the data center “stool”

cisco-logo

Chris Mellor interpreted Cisco’s recent body language around servers.  Will they jump into the server business? 

It’s not that much of a stretch.  It’s only fair, as HP and others don’t shy away from dabbling in Cisco’s networking space. 

And Cisco has already crossed into the storage realm.

Used to be that IT was all about processing.  Today servers, storage and networking are the three legs of the data center stool.  They’re the Mind, Stomach and Voice of the digital body of business.

The smartest of the big players in all three spaces will look for ways to corner them all.

January 5, 2009 - 1:51 pm | By Pete Steege | Posted in Data Center, Servers, Trends | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

HP moves to 300GB SAS

75% less power and 70% less space than 3.5″ drives

hp-logo

HP’s making the move to 300GB 2.5″ SAS drives.  The Seagate-built drive is twice the capacity of previous 2.5″ SAS drives.  HP began shipping the Savvio 10K 300GB SAS drive worldwide to resellers this week.

This is another step in the rapid enterprise storage form factor transition underway.  2.5″ is mainstream for datacenters  starting now.

December 12, 2008 - 2:26 pm | By Pete Steege | Posted in Data Center, IT Storage, Products, Servers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)