Storage News - Page 59

Renowned hard drive maker Western Digital is now shipping the world's first 10 terabyte (TB) hard drive in the HGST Ultrastar He10.

The He10 is a helium drive that features perpendicular magnetic recording and is said to provide the lowest power consumption per TB on the market (56% fewer watts/TB than competing helium HDDs). Additionally, it includes a five-year warranty and claims a 2.5 million mean-time-between-failures rating. I might be inclined to be skeptical of this figure, but WD's reputation precedes it, and my own WD drive has been going strong for more years than I can remember.

The drive is aimed at enterprise customers that run media and cloud-based application businesses among other outfits, so enthusiasts with large appetites won't be able to get their hands on it. Netflix sure seems excited about it: its director of content delivery architecture David Fullagar says, "We've been using the HGST HelioSeal drives for a long time and not only do they give us more capacity, they have contributed to a lower overall power envelope and higher storage density, which has allowed us to maximize our data footprint and create a network that is optimized for TCO."

There's no denying that Samsung isn't a big player in the NAND flash game, with a report now confirming exactly how much dominance that this company asserted over the market in recent times.

DRAMeXchange and Storage Newsletter reported that not only did NAND flash pricing decline in the third quarter of 2015, but the global flash revenue raised 2.4% as a result. This gain in revenue was seemingly soaked up mainly by Samsung, with this piece further confirming that the technology giant controlled 31.5% of all NAND revenue during this time period.

With second place going to Toshiba at 20.5% and SanDisk lagging behind at 15.4%, it becomes apparent that Samsung are well ahead of its competition. This percentage difference gap is smaller than quarter 2 though, with Samsung posting a 32.6% market share compared to 19.1% for Toshiba and 13.4% for SanDisk. It's also interesting to note that Micron has recently slipped out of third place from Q2 - Q3, dropping a 1.4% share.

Seagate Technology has teamed up with Newisys to create "the industry's fastest flash storage design," as published in a recent press release. This advancement in technology allows for a new Newisys NSS-2601 storage server to achieve block I/O performance of 1TB/s.

This number is achieved by pairing the NSS-2601 with dual NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Modules containing Seagate SAS 1200.2 SSDs within, ensuring these blisteringly fast speeds are achieved by a single 42U rack. In addition, the press release notes that Newisys 2U servers packed with 60 Seagate SSDs is able to post an impressive bandwith of 49GB/s.

Aimed at the industrial crowd, this advancement is a large "breakthrough in storage system performance," says Seagate VP Brett Pemble. Partnered with Newisys, this new technology is designed to assist metadata caches and prediction servers for industries such as finance, oil and gas, weather and more, due to needing this high bandwidth option in order to processes microsecond alterations.

Synology has teased that it is making some very large changes in 2016, where the NAS maker will be unveiling its new DiskStation Manager (DSM) 6.0 operating system, apps for wearables like the Apple Watch, advanced network attached storage (NAS) products, and its first ever router - the Synology RT1900ac.

The company will launch the DSM 6.0 beta today, with the full release scheduled for sometime in 2016. Synology Marketing Manager Jason Bonoan said: "Synology is more than NAS devices. Many of our business customers use our DiskStations and RackStations as replacement servers. So, it makes sense that SMEs and SMBs asked for more features for virtualization, data protection, disaster recovery, and productivity apps. We've listened and redesigned our OS and hardware to meet their demands".

On the consumer side of things, Synology is working on being the first to support Apple Watch with DSM 6.0. Synology's updated OS will be the first to support Apple Watch, where users can "use simple gestures or voice control to quickly check or create notes, or enjoy their favorite music - whenever and wherever they want". Inside of DSM 6.0 will be a new Video Station which is "refreshingly new, strikingly intuitive" according to the company. Synology added: "the completely redesigned Video Station will use a popular on-screen button layout, making navigation smoother and more intuitive than ever. New support for offline transcoding and Windows 10 enables users to switch between different devices and platforms - so they can enjoy an uninterrupted viewing experience".

Samsung has just announced the latest SSD in its range, the new 950 PRO SSD. What makes the Samsung 950 PRO special? It's the first NVMe M.2 form factor consumer SSD with V-NAND technology, with some insane performance to boot.

The new drive arrives on a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, in various sizes. The Samsung 950 PRO will come in 256GB and 512GB capacities, with the 512GB version featuring insane sequential read speeds of 2.5GB/sec, while it can write at 1.5GB/sec. Random read performance is just as impressive, hovering at 300,000 IOPS while we have write speeds of up to 110,000 IOPS.

Samsung is using its second generation MLV V-NAND 32-layer 128Gb die with UBX controller and magician software to make the 950 PRO, while we also have AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption that will protect your data. Dynamic Thermal Guard will protect your drive and data in environments of between 0-70C, and it can take a physical shock of up to 1500G/0.5ms and vibrations of up to 20G. So if you want to take it up in your fighter jet, you can.

I feel quite privileged to have all of my systems powered by SSDs, with the biggest ones being 480GB. But those 1TB SSDs are just huge, and by the looks of things, they're only going to get bigger, and very quick.

Intel is working with Micron in their joint collaboration in IMFT, where the two giants will be making some sweet NAND together. With that in mind, Intel is now projecting to have 30TB SSDs by 2018, and passing 100TB by the end of the decade. Hitting 100TB+ SSDs isn't going to be easy, with Intel expecting datacenters and the enterprise markets to move over to flash-based storage quicker and quicker.

As it stands, flash-based storage is used to cache "hot" data, but Intel wants to see SSDs used for much more than that in the enterprise. The chipmaker sees NVMe-based solutions taking over, thanks to their reduced overheads and increased speeds and lowered latency.

What we already know about Optane and 3D XPoint: We know that Optane is Intel's brand name for storage using 3D XPoint, and we know that XPoint consists of layers (known as stacks). Each stack has wires that run perpendicular to each other (they are silver/gray in the image).

Between each set of perpendicular wires are a selector (yellow) and a cell (green). By providing varying amounts of voltage to the selector it can write or read to the cell. The benefit here is that the cells don't use transistors, and theoretically (depending on the size of the cell) you could squeeze much more of this into a given space than you could with the traditional transistor.

Cells can be written and read to at the same speed since you can find any point in space with only three points of reference. Now 3D X-Point fills a spot in the current memory market, right in between DRAM and NAND based SSDs. Its latency is 10x slower than DRAM but 1000x faster than NAND. It has similar density compared to NAND SSDs, which means its 10x denser than DRAM. All the speeds and density aside, 3D XPoint also offers non-volatility, which means it can store data even when it is powered off.

Thecus Technology has launched the 7-bay N7770-10G and 8-bay N8880U-10G NAS units, aimed at helping businesses increase their storage abilities.

The 10G NAS features Intel Core i3 (3.3 GHz), 8GB DDR3 ECC RAM, and a 10G PCIe card - offering SATA drives with NAS stacking. Each unit has 6 USB 2.0 ports, and USB 2 x 3.0 ports, 1 HDMI port, with support for 3.5" and 2.5" SATA HDDs or SSDs.

Both the N7770-10G and N888U-10G run the Thecus OS5 software, a Web-based OS making advanced data management easier. More than 700 apps focused on data backup, content management, multimedia, and other critical business features are available in the Thecus App Center.

At IDF 2015 Intel has revealed Optane Technology, a new hardware brand built around its new XPoint high-performance 3D flash memory.

Intel's new XPoint-powered Optane hardware is planned for a release in 2016, marketed across an array of form factors including standard SSD's and will even be compatible with Xeon systems via DIMM. Intel affirms that the high-density Optane tech isn't just a conventional storage solution and can be used to help power and optimize datacenter servers and Xeon workstations that require low-latency and high-bandwidth performance.

Last month Intel shed light on the next-generation Xpoint (pronounced Crosspoint) 3D memory with an number of impressive specs; since its 10X more dense than traditional SSD's, Xpoint boasts speeds up to 1,000 faster than traditional NAND storage and offers a whopping 10TB+ in SSD storage capacities (Samsung has already hit 16TB SSD's with its own 3D memory solution).

At the Flash Memory Summit, Samsung unveiled a massive 16TB SSD that is the "world's largest storage drive", an incredible feat by the South Korean giant.

Samsung's new 16TB HDD doesn't have a price, nor do we know about read/write speeds or IOPS. But we can expect that it will pack Samsung's next-gen 48-layer, 3-bit V-NAND technology. Samsung said that it could "easily double the capacity of Samsung's existing SSD line-ups, and provide an ideal solution for multi-terabyte SSDs".

There's no ETA on Samsung's new 16TB SSD, but we shouldn't expect it anytime soon. We still have to wait for 1TB and 2TB SSDs to become more affordable in the consumer market before we leap frog past 4TB, 8TB and 12TB. But, this is super-exciting news nonetheless.