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Hitting the hard drive 'sweet spot'

Editorial Type: Technology Focus     Date: 03-2015    Views: 2631      





As the data centre evolves, so must the disk drives that populate it, explains Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of storage technology, WD

For many years, we've looked at storage in the data centre in terms of "enterprise-scale." Traditional storage has been and continues to be a great fit for enterprise-scale. Hard drive arrays are fast, dependable, capacious, and affordable. But now the top tier of service providers are exceeding enterprise-scale and transitioning into something even more demanding: Web-scale. Consider the level of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and similar globe-spanning organisations. These groups fuel modern digital existence and are trusted with safeguarding it.

However, with the overlapping explosions of mobile and unstructured data, the storage challenges of 2020 will not be the same as those of 2010. As such, the providers grappling with the lion's share of that storage will face different issues and priorities than more mainstream enterprises. The question of "Can we store it?" now gives way to "How can we optimally store - and scale - it?" Answers must accommodate providers' operational and TCO needs, changing global usage patterns, and economics that can scale evenly with demand.

CAPACITY STORAGE: ENTERPRISE VS. WEB-SCALE
Traditionally, capacity storage has focused on 7,200 RPM hard drives spinning the highest number of affordable terabytes (currently in the 4 TB to 6 TB range). Reliability, performance, and cost per gigabyte all fell within a comfortable range for businesses needing to grow their petabytes of lower tier storage. Web-scale organisations, however, face new storage parameters. They need to assess metrics such as performance per watt and capacity per watt. In an era when a user's decade-old photo (that might not have been viewed since just after being uploaded) must still be accessible within seconds, is tape still the right fit for archiving? Are there ways to trade some performance for higher reliability?

Emerging Web-scale organisations have been asking WD questions like these recently. Clearly, a new range of market needs was evolving, so WD went to the drawing board and began to redesign the hard drive for this emergent class of mass storage. The results will soon be seen throughout WD's Re, Se, and Ae data centre drive families. In particular, WD will be the first vendor to market with hard drives optimised for Web-scale archiving, an application that effectively constitutes a new storage tier for disk.

Enterprise archiving, of course, has conventionally relied on tape (and still often does due to compliance restrictions). The price and capacity points were right, even if performance was such that it might take minutes to hours to fulfil a file request. Many organisations persisted with tape simply because there was no better solution for the task, although they have increasingly asked WD to come up with something. Some wanted a more feasible, sustainable approach to offering storage as a cloud service. Others wanted a more cost-effective approach to maintaining data - potentially for centuries - without having to "bury it in a cave."

TARGETING NEW ARCHIVING
When it comes to lower tier disk storage, IT generally examines combinations of four factors: performance, capacity, power, and cost. At this level, "performance" tends to mean "will reliably deliver megabytes in a few seconds or less," not "blistering IOPS," which appear higher in the storage stack. Capacity remains magnetic disk technology's forte. With platters now reaching over 1TB each, it's possible to achieve very high capacities per drive by stacking eight platters per unit (or even twelve platters, as in the case of 1.6"-high drives). WD leads the industry in volumetric drive density.

High platter counts push up drive BOM costs, but, coupled with high areal density, also push down cost-per-gigabyte, which is what Web-scale IT wants to see in a lower tier application. Concurrently, WD is driving down power consumption in these drives through everything from lower spin rates to PCB component choices to highly optimised firmware. Again, coupled with high capacity, this results in best-in-class power-per-gigabyte results.



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