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All 6Gb/s SAS, all the time
October 30, 2009 – 11:07 am
It’s like HDTV.
First we had HD televisions without any content. Then we had some HD broadcasts, and some HD DVDs in the stores.
Then – inflection point! – all the pieces were there. TVs, DVRs, broadcast, DVDs, web content. The whole thing took off faster than you can say “Blockbuster fire sale”.
End-to-end 6Gb/s SAS has arrived
LSI, SuperMicro and Seagate demonstrated the 6Gb/s SAS equivalent. It’s just a matter of time before 3Gb SAS is a quaint relic of days gone by. This opens the 6G/s door wide for system builders too.
Seagate has 6Gb/s SAS available on the following products:
- Savvio 15K
- Savvio 10K
- Cheetah 15K
- Constellation
- Constellation ES (coming soon)
If you haven’t built 6Gb/s SAS into your plans, time to get crackin’.
HP goes all in for SAS
July 16, 2009 – 8:29 am
Beth Pariseau reported on two big storage announcements from HP:
- HP will move its entire storage line to six Gbps small form factor SAS, starting with the D2000 in the fall. That’s two valuable transitions in one: moving from 4Gbps FC to 6 Gbps SAS, and moving from 3.5″ drives to 2.5″ drives.
- All HP Proliant servers will now support 15K, 10K and 7200 rpm SAS drives. That’s pure SAS from head to toe.
HP has been a strong SAS proponent in servers for years. Bringing 7200 rpm high capacity SAS drives into the mix is a big deal, because it reduces the cost/capacity for servers while preserving the full enterprise-class advantage set that SAS brings to the table.
No wonder IDC sees a bright future for SAS.
HP blades: what’s good for servers is good for storage
June 25, 2009 – 1:41 pm
Chris Mellor at The Register heard from Gary Veale, HP’s new StorageWorks EMEA VP on HP’s storage future – and it looks a lot like HP’s current servers.
Veale says HP will decouple storage management, processors and storage with a modular blade approach. Processor blades can be a place to innovate around deduplication, virtualization, etc. while storage blades are designed to cram the most storage into the most efficient package.
Dedicated storage blades will free HP to more rapidly grow their capacity and efficiency. A singular focus on storage, unencumbered by the processing and management considerations that are important, but now delegated further up the chain.
Keep your eyes on 2.5″ drives
Chris goes on to speculate that HP might create tiers of storage blades, with 2.5″ drives in some for performance and 3.5″ drives in others for capacity.
Maybe. But 2.5″ drives - like Seagate’s Constellation enterprise 7200 rpm drive - are 500GB and growing. Soon 2.5″ drives will deliver more capacity in a blade than 3.5″ drives can. Moreover, 2.5″ product offerings have broadened to include 15K, 10K and 7200 RPM performance classes. Everyproduct you can get in a 3.5″ form factor, you can now get in 2.5″.
Keep your eyes on 2.5″ drives as it becomes the common standard for storage across the industry. It’s only a matter of time.
Disk drives prove to be greener than SSDs in servers
June 24, 2009 – 7:47 am
Ideas International compared a disk-based server to an SSD-based server using the new Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1/E efficiency benchmark for some very interesting results.
The disk-based server used 300 GB Seagate Savvio 10K drives. The SSD server was an IBM model using 69 GB solid state devices.
Summary:
- Cost/IOPS: about the same
- Cost/gigabyte: disk-based server wins
- Gigabytes/Watt: disk-based server wins
- IOPS/Watt: SSD-based server wins
An interesting observation from SearchStorage on this test: the SSD-based server used about the same power (within 3%) whether operating or idling. The disk-based system used 78% at idle compare to its peak power usage.
Energy Star for storage: shift the focus to idle
June 17, 2009 – 8:13 am
The EPA is working on an Energy Star specification for storage systems, much like they’ve developed for servers.
Unlike the server specification, the EPA is focusing on power consumption by storage systems as they read and write data, vs. while they are idle. Big mistake. Storage is mostly about…well, storing. The biggest impact comes from the steady-state power draw over the hours, days, months and years the storage system operates – not the relatively rare moments when data is coming in or going out.
That’s like measuring the energy efficiency of a refrigerator only when you open the door.
Storage read/write utilization time varies by application of course. But on average it is low. Maybe we need a Mega Data Center specification and a more mainstream specification.
What am I missing here? Why focus on active storage power consumption vs. idle?
Comments welcome.
The SATA-ization of servers
June 1, 2009 – 10:56 am
Source: Ars Technica
Server technology is borrowing on a proven trend from storage with a new generation of cost-efficient architectures.
Over the past five years, data centers have been transformed by the addition of capacity-optimized disk drives like Seagate’s new Constellation drives. Whether you call them nearline, midline, business critical or enterprise SATA drives, they have not cannibalized enterprise disk drives as some expected, but actually expanded the demand for storage by accelerating data growth. The more data that could be stored efficiently, the more applications were created.
Dell’s new sub-blade server achitecture is a significant move in the same direction for servers. It’s not obvious if this trend works with or against the current of virtualization in servers, but one thing is clear: more efficient servers will not trash the existing server market, but will likely expand it by opening up new applications.
There’s latent demand for data-hungry applications. The more efficient servers and storage become, the more data will be created. The exponential data growth curve continues!
For HP servers, what a difference a drive makes!
May 29, 2009 – 11:42 am
As I was perusing some HP server benchmarks recently, I was struck by how integral disk drives are to server performance – and not just IOPS. Disk drives are a quiet but essential part of what makes a server fast, energy efficient or just do whatever it was born to do.
Take for example HP’s DL370 G6 that has broken records in 2P TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) performance. 2.5″ form factor 15K rpm drives are under the covers playing a key role. These are the fastest disk drives on the planet – just what you need when breaking system speed records.
Then there’s the HP DL380 G6 and its SPECpower rating. The G6 is incredibly efficient, with 40X more performance per watt than the G4. And while the 2.5″ drive used in this test wasn’t specified, enterprise disk drive power consumption varies dramatically. All 2.5″ form factor drives are 70% more power efficient that their 3.5″ elders. And Seagate’s new Constellation 2.5″ 7200 rpm enterprise drive, is a SAS power miser, using 2.8 W when idle, and less than half that in standby mode.
The lesson of the day: server drives are not all created equal. Check under the hood to be sure a server has the class of drive meant for your application.
Finding your true spin speed
May 28, 2009 – 7:39 am
Whether its hard disks or fast cars, when it comes to speed, it’s all about revolutions per minute or RPM. Critically important (to the tune of $3M) to Helio Castroneves, 2009 winner of the Indy 500 this past weekend, RPM represents the number of full rotations completed in one minute around a fixed axis.
Just as important to IT managers evaluating their disk drive performance and data access time, RPM signifies the fixed spin speed that drives are capable of performing. There’s been some confusion around the capabilities of some manufacturer’s drives being able to vary a drive’s rotational speed during use. The Register recently set the record straight. . There’s no question that RPM is the measuring stick for performance and is critically important when comparing and contrasting hard disk drives.
