Seagate Launches 12TB Enterprise Capacity HDD for Next-Generation Data Centres at OCP 2017


New Drive Adds Innovations to Help Enterprise and Cloud Providers Gain Control over Unstructured Data

Last week at the OCP Summit, Seagate announced that its new 12TB helium enterprise drives are now shipping to cloud providers for evaluation. Seagate plans to start volume shipments for production availability in the June quarter of 2017. The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 12TB incorporates several technology advancements developed to address a critical requirement hyperscale customers face in this age of exponential data growth: the ability to locate and organise the increasing amount of unstructured data they possess and make it available quickly and reliably for customers.

Seagate’s new 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is precision engineered to accommodate 550TB workloads annually. It has a market leading MTBF (mean time between failure) of 2.5 million hours and is designed to operate 24/7 for five years in the most rigorous enterprise data centre environments, delivering far greater reliability and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise storage products in the industry.

“Cloud Service Providers, Telecoms and Enterprises utilise high density storage for the mountains of unstructured data they must manage, driven by an increasing proliferation of connected endpoint devices and sensors. Seagate’s new 12TB hard drive is an ideal component for our OCP-based solutions, and the integration of these innovative new drives will offer our customers the reliable and efficient storage they need,” said Mike Yang, senior vice president and general manager of Quanta Computer Inc. and president of Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT).

Understanding the data management challenges of top cloud providers
Seagate’s engineers have worked closely with the world’s largest cloud providers and OEMs to gain a deeper understanding of the data management challenges they face. This insight led our engineering team to implement several new firmware and hardware innovations to the helium-filled hard drives, resulting in the following key improvements:

  • Highly scalable hard drive storage that is rapidly deployable for maximum performance and energy efficiency for Open Compute Project (OCP) platforms.
  • 50 percent higher capacity, which enables hyperscale customers to deploy over 10PB of high performance storage in a single 42U rack for the first time – maintaining current space, weight, and power consumption profiles.
  • 21 percent increase in IOPs performance/watt perfect for next generation eco-friendly infrastructures.
  • 20 percent increase in enhanced caching performance, which results in faster access to unstructured data.

These innovations enable customers to gain more control over unstructured data, store vastly more information and retrieve it more quickly than ever before without expanding the storage footprint in the data centre. By offering the lowest power consumption and lowest weight in the industry, the drop-in upgrade 12TB drive translates to a groundbreaking TCO for hyperscale customers.

“Data storage innovations have led to dramatically improved business results. For example, Cloud companies are storing massive amounts of videos and images in hyperscale infrastructures for search and social applications. Our 12TB drive helps solve the proliferation of data both enterprise and cloud service customers must manage and move, while improving response times,” said John Morris, vice president of products at Seagate.

“Seagate’s new 12TB high density, enterprise-class hard drive will be a great addition to our OCP-compliant storage product family. As a major OCP solution provider, it’s important to ensure compatibility of this innovative, high density hard drive with our OCP solutions that meet the needs of this growing market,” said Steven Lu, chief of product marketing of Wiwynn Corp.

The 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD—along with several demonstrations of Seagate SSD products that meet Open Compute Project specifications— were showcased at OCP Summit 2017.

For more information on the new 12TB helium Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD and all Seagate products please visit www.seagate.com or http://blog.seagate.com/intelligent/seagate-launches-12tb-enterprise-capacity-hdd-for-next-generation-data-centers-at-ocp-2017/.

About Seagate

Seagate creates space for the human experience by innovating how data is stored, shared and used. Learn more at www.seagate.com.

©2017 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology and the Seagate logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications. When referring to drive capacity, one terabyte, or TB, equals one thousand billion bytes. Your computer’s operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions and will not be available for data storage.

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