Enterprise Computing: Seagate Announces new Constellation Hard Drives

Seagate announced this week the release of their new Constellation hard drives. Compared to the Savvio range (which are high-performance, low form-factor), these drives are aimed at lower tier archiving solutions and will scale to 2TB.

I had a briefing on these drives a couple of weeks ago and there's the usual capacity and performance increase metrics to drool over (let's face it, who doesn't want a 2TB drive), however, impressive as it is, pure capacity increases don't cut it any more for me. What's more relevant are the other less obvious features.

Power Reduction

With PowerTrim, Seagate are claiming a 2.8W consumption (idle) for the 2.5" form-factor drive. This compares to 5.2W for the Savvio 10K 146GB - almost half. This reduction is relevant not just for the power saving, but for the benefits in reduced cooling requirements and consequently the ability to stack more of these drives in a small space.

Constellation also provides PowerChoice, which will allow drives to be progressively spun down to reduce power. I've included a couple of graphics courtesy of Seagate which show the benefits of the different power-down levels.

In a previous discussion with COPAN, they indicated to me that their power-down solution had seen an increase in the life of hard drives, so I would expect Constellation to see the same benefits, although Seagate haven't indicated that.

Encryption

Although encryption isn't new, what's good to see is that it is becoming a standard feature on enterprise drives and will be available on SAS Constellation drives later this year (Seagate Secure SED).

Security breaches are unacceptable; destroying soft-fail drives because they can't be recycled with "sensitive" material on them is also irresponsible. Hopefully encryption can tackle both issues head-on.

Summary

So where and how will these drives be used? Well, I hope the major vendors are looking to bring out 2.5" form-factor products and potentially blended products as well. It's not unreasonable to expect these guys to be using 2.5" drives to make their products lighter and more efficient. Also, for modular and monolithic arrays, exchangable canisters or enclosures could easily allow 2.5" drives to be incorporated into existing hardware.

Oh and before anyone comments, yes I am aware that the "multiple supplier" argument will be used as an excuse not to adopt this technology...

Of course, we shouldn't forget the underlying reason why we've reached the position of 2TB in a single drive - we are keeping too much data. We all need to pay as much attention to optimising our existing assets as we do to installing new and shiny ones.

Where's All the Data Gone?

Eric Savitz over at Tech Trader has an interesting article today.


Demand at Seagate is down and consolidation of the industry is expected. However as recently as March last year EMC was telling us how storage growth just keeps on spiralling upwards.


So what's happening? Are we becoming inherently more efficient at storing our data all of a sudden, now that a credit crunch is upon us? Somehow I don't think so.


Demand ebbs and flows as finances dictate the ability to purchase new equipment, but growth remains steady. Technology is replaced constantly but just like you or I might hold on to our car for another year or so before replacement, so will IT departments, preferring to pay maintenance on existing kit rather than rip and replace to the latest and greatest. I can see two consequences from this;

• More time and effort will need to be paid to using current resources more efficiently.
• Migration to new hardware will need to be even more slick and quick to reduce the overhead of migration wastage.

I'll discuss these subjects in more detail this week.

New Seagate Savvio Drives

Seagate have announced the availability of the next generation of Savvio 2.5" drives running at 15K. Capacity is increased to 146GB (I'm waiting for confirmation this is the case as there are no data sheets online yet).

The capacity increase is overdue to keep up with the roadmap of 3.5" drives and co-incidentally I'm in the process of reviewing the existing Savvio model at the moment, more on this next week.

Meantime, last December I posted on the subject of 2.5" drives in Enterprise arrays and created this spreadsheet comparing different models. The reason for creating the sheet was to see if the physical density of 2.5" drives would exceed that of traditional 3.5" models. At the time, the best 2.5" drive offered 0.702GB/cm3 compared to a slightly better 0.796GB/cm3 for the 3.5" equivalent (73GB versus 300GB drives respectively).

With the release of 450GB 15K drives, the 3.5" pushed the lead further to 1.194GB/cm3. The latest Savvio has grabbed that lead back with 1.404GB/cm3!

OK, so the maths is not perfect and I'm talking about fractional differences which could be absorbed by the connectivity and interface attachments needed to hot plug these devices into arrays, but consider this; each 450GB 3.5" drive can be replaced by three 146GB 2.5" equivalents, giving 3 times as much parallel I/O capability. In storage arrays this is bound to have a benefit on throughput.

Now as to why 2.5" adoption hasn't occurred so far, word on the street is that it hasn't occurred due to the lack of multiple vendor streams. For the record, could only find Fujitsu and Seagate doing 2.5" 15K drives today.

Whatever Happened to Hybrid Drives?

Over 18 months ago, I discussed in a post (here) the Hybrid Storage Alliance who were looking to increase the performance of hard drives by adding large amounts of flash to each device. But where are they now?

A quick check on their website shows precious little information. In fact what's on offer seems to point to using hybrids for just laptops and Vista. Unless they're working on new products, it seems to me that the manufacturers of hard drives have missed a trick.

EMC have made a clear stance to move towards flash (with their EFDs) but in reality they're targeted as specific applications requiring super-fast performance. In any case, the cost will make them prohibitive for most customers (initially, at least). Drive speeds are fairly much plateaued at 15K (although some manufacturers are discussing 20K spin speeds) as the power/cooling issue is obviously a problem when going at faster revolutions.

Taking these factors into consideration isn't there a gap in the market for Enterprise Hybrid Drives? I'd like to stake a claim for the term EHD at this point before anyone else does :-)

It seems to me like a logical step; manufacturers such as Seagate won't want to give up their dominance to flash in a hurry and in any case flash is too expensive for most usages.

Perhaps there are issues getting EHDs to work; you wouldn't want to spin them down (although you might accept them spinning slower); maybe there are problems with effectively filling and destaging the flash cache on the drives which requires more thought from the array manufacturers. Either way I'm speculating but it seems there's an opportunity there for the taking.

Remember, Enterprise Hybrid Drives, heard here first!!

How Many IOPS?

A question I get asked occasionally is; "How many IOPS can my RAID group sustain?" in relation to Enterprise class arrays.

Obviously the first question is to determine what the data profile is, however if it isn't known, then assume the I/O will be 100% random. If all the I/O is random, then each I/O request will require a seek (move the head to the right cylinder on the disk) and the disk to rotate to the start of the area to read (latency) which for 15K drives is 2ms. Taking the latest Seagate Cheetah 15K fibre channel drives, each drive has an identical seek time of 3.4ms for reads. This is a total time of 5.4ms, or 185 IOPS (1000/5.4). The same calculation for a Seagate SATA drive gives a worst case throughput of 104 IOPS, approximately half the capacity of the fibre channel drive.

For a RAID group of RAID-5 3+1 fibre channel drives, data will be spread across all 4 drives, so this RAID group has a potential worst case I/O throughput of 740 IOPS.

Clearly this is a "rule of thumb" as in practical terms, not every I/O will be completely random and incur the seek/latency penalties. Also, enterprise arrays have cache (the drives themselves have cache) and plenty of clever algorithms to mask the issues of the moving technology.

There are also plenty of other points of contention within the host->array stack which makes this whole subject more complicated, however, when comparing different drive speeds, calculating a worst case scenario gives a good indication of how differing drives will perform.

Incidentally, as I just mentioned, the latest Seagate 15K drives (146GB, 300GB and 460GB) all have the same performance characteristics, so tiering based on drive size isn't that useful. The only exception to this is when a high I/O throughput is required. With smaller drives, data has to be spread across more spindles, increasing the available bandwidth. That's why I think tiering should be done on drive speed not size...

Recycling Drives - Update

Last week I posted about wasted hard drives, removed from arrays and crushed to prevent the leak of sensitive data.

I contacted HGST and Seagate to get some additional background. Here are their responses, slightly edited to correct any spelling mistakes but otherwise intact.

Seagate

(a) when will the technology be deployed in Enterprise FC drives? Our OEMs are currently developing with the Cheetah 15K.6 FDE, a drive that Seagate has already in production.

(b) is the technology proprietary to Seagate? - No, this will becompliant with the Trusted Computing Group's spec. All hard drive vendors are participating in this Trusted Computing Group and we expect that they will have self-encrypting drives that will be inter-operable with ours.

(c) is DriveTrust accepted by the US Government and other similar organisations as secure enough to treat a drive as "wiped" if the encryption keys are removed? Endorsement from National Security Agency (NSA) has already been received for the 1st Self-Encrypting Drive Model-the Momentus(r) 5400 FDE hard drive, for protection of information in computers deployed by U.S. government agencies and contractors for national security purposes.

(d) are any of the "big" manufacturers (EMC/HDS/IBM) looking to deploy DriveTrust enabled drives in storage arrays? IBM and LSI have both publicly announced that they will do so. Note that Hitachi has also just announced a self-encrypting drive, the Deskstar E7K1000, a drive designed for business critical storage systems.

(e) Where do the drives go when they're wiped for final disposal? Extra shipping is involved to ship a drive to a special data destruction service facility, where it can be degaussed or shredded, and then the drive must be shipped to [be] environmentally disposed of. Alternatively, a drive may be over written, a process that takes hours and hours, using energy and tying up system resources, and then may be re-purposed.


HGST

My name is Masaru Masuda, working on product planning for Hitachi GST. Let me try to answer your question. Like Raj mentioned below, we have already supported bulk encryption feature for 2.5" and 3.5"and will support it to Enterprise product next year. With the bulk encryption feature, user data on the HDD media is automatically and always encrypted by the SoC inside [the] HDD. The security feature has two basic functions. One is active protection of data (encryption with secret key) and secure erase of the drive by deleting the encryption key for repurposing or disposal. As you pointed out, Standardization is a key for security. Therefore, a non profit security organization called TCG (Trusted Computing Group) was formed as described in the page 5 and 6 of the attached package. We have been very actively involved in the activities of TCG and plan to pick up security feature based on TCG standards which will be implemented from next year.The security market is still small but it has been growing steadily due to the data security concern and also as a fast and cheap solution for repurposing of drives in Server applications or disposal of failed drives. Also we have had a recycling process for drives failed in the internal testing and for drives returned from the field.

Thanks to both companies for their responses.

So it seems to me that in the future there will be no excuse for scrapping drives. I think the retirement process for HDDs should form part of the "green measurement" of storage.

Seagate Raises the Bar with 1.5TB Drive

Seagate announced yesterday version 11 of their Barracuda hard drive range, to be released next month (August 2008) with a maximum capacity of 1.5TB. The news link has all the speeds and feeds if you're interested in how they have achieved this remarkable milestone.

I've trawled the 'net to plot the release of previous versions of the drive and their capacities at the time. Here's a graph of the releases I could find, going back to 2002. Trending the growth (totally un-scientifically of course), then we can expect to see 2TB drives by December 2008, 3TB drives by November 2009 and 4TB drives by June 2010. This may be a little optimistic as the trending is skewed slightly by the recent advances perpendicular recording has brought to capacity growth, but maybe not, as my recent post on Hitachi 5TB drives shows.

Unfortunately, sustained transfer rates for these drives have remained around the 100MB/s mark, so offloading a complete drive sequentially takes around 250 hours, by my calculations. I'd love to know how long a RAID rebuild would take (Seagate if you fancy loaning me some drives, I'll find out for you!).

As previously discussed, the increased capacities are good as they increase the GB/Watt and GB/cm3 density but we're going to be increasingly challenged by how we get data on and off them - especially when the drives fail.

The Case of Decimal v. Binary

We all know that disk drive manufacturers have been conning us for years with their definition of what constitutes a gigabyte. There are two schools of thought; the binary GB, which is 1024x1024x1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes and the decimal GB which is quoted as 1000x1000x1000 or 1 billion bytes. The difference is significant (7.4%) and something that has annoyed me for years, mainly for having to explain to "management" why the 100TB of storage they bought stores less than 100TB of data (significantly less with some manufacturers).

Seagate have just lost a class action law suit (see here) which means they are forced to give a 5% rebate to customers plus some free backup software.

Unfortunately, those of us who have purchased storage subsystems from vendors will not be able to claim as the case refers to customers who bought stand-alone units:

"You are a member of the settlement class if, between March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007, you purchased in the United States a new Seagate brand hard disc drive from an authorized Seagate retailer or distributor, separately as a Seagate product that was not pre-installed into and bundled with a personal computer or other electronic device."

So I guess EMC/HDS/IBM can breathe easy at this stage. It does beg the question though, when are our large array vendors going to quote the real figures for the usable storage available on an array? I have various calculators I use to help me work out the usable storage (before and after LUN creation and with varying RAID types) as I need to present real rather than throretical figures when sizing arrays. I think we need some more transparency here.

Analysis: Seagate

This is the first of a series of posts looking at storage companies and their investment potential.

** DISCLAIMER: This and related blog entries are for fun only and do not represent investment advice. You should make your own opinions on investments or consult a financial adviser **

Background

Seagate's main business is the manufacture and distribution of hard disk drives. The company was founded in 1979 by Al Shugart and Finis Conner. Shugart is regarded as the father of modern hard disks, being involved with the teams that invented both the first hard drive at IBM in the 1950's and with inventing the floppy disk. Today, Seagate offers products for business and consumer markets including the latest portable devices. These range from 8GB 3600RPM Compact Flash drives to the sixth generation of the Cheetah drive - a 15K RPM drive with 450GB capacity.

Market Details

Seagate is quoted on the NYSE with the code STX.

Shares outstanding: 528,788,000
Market Capitalisation: $14.55 billion
Earnings Per Share: 2.28c
P/E Ratio: 11.82
Yield: 1.45%

* figures from http://www.nyse.com/ on 29 October 2007.

These are lots of interesting numbers, but what do they mean? I've linked to Wikipedia entries which explain what most of the important terms are.

The P/E Ratio gives a good idea of how fairly valued the shares are. It is a ratio of the price of the shares compared to the earnings of the company, therefore the lower the number, the better. For comparison, here are a few more P/E ratios; Netapp - 28.79, EMC - 39.03, Google - 47.4, Brocade - 17.67. Seagate therefore seems low, but P/E can't be looked at in isolation. Higher P/E ratios may indicate a company with potentially higher future growth prospects. I would say that Seagate's business is purely incremental growth as they are not likely to be bringing a new product class to market or radically changing their business model.

Yield indicates how valuable the last dividend was as a percentage of the share price, so at 1.45%, the return on $100,000 of stock would be only $1450 per year. If dividends were the only reason for investing, it would take 69 years to return your investment! Obviously Seagate is declaring dividends, so value in the shares is being realised in both capital appreciation and dividend earnings.

Competitors

The hard drive industry is small. In fact Seagate recently acquired Maxtor (although the brand is still retained) and made the industry smaller. The major competitors in the hard drive market are Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (which is a combination of the Hitachi and old IBM storage businesses) and Western Digital. HGST and Seagate together own the market for 15K Enterprise (FC) drives.

Outlook

The hard drive market is continually challenged to increase capacity, improve performance and reduce the power and cooling demands of hard drives. All manufacturers are innovating to get ahead of the competition, however most advances seem to be small steps rather than giant leaps and so no one vendor in the market stands out as having a big competitive leap over the others. It is certainly true to say that the hard disk has become a commodity item.

As a technology leader and considering the future demand for storage (which shows no signs of diminishing), Seagate is set to continue to grow their business. At this stage whether Seagate will form part of my virtual portfolio, only time will tell, however I would say that one HDD vendor will be there.

Storage Stocks

Josh's recent posts have reminded me of a little piece of work I started but didn't finish a few weeks ago.

I've been compiling a list of storage companies which are publicly traded and trying to determine which I feel are value for money as an investment.

** DISCLAIMER ** This blog does not provide investment advice and all opinions on the values of stocks are mine entirely. You should not act upon these opinions but make your own judgements on the merits of investing in any company.

Phew, now that's done, let's get on with it. I guess the first question is why am I doing it? Well, of all the industries in which to invest, I would like to hope I understand the most about storage IT companies than any other. I say hope, as understanding what makes a company good as an investment will be not just their current figures, valuation etc, but rather there future potential for generating revenue and business. That's where things get difficult. There are the easy major players which are guaranteed to make revenue; just think of EMC, Cisco, IBM, Sun, Seagate, Netapp and so on. These companies have established businesses and make money. However not all pay dividends, so money has to be made on capital growth from some of the shares. There are also plenty of blips and gotchas to deal with. For example, Sun and Netapp - how has their current "misunderstanding" over patent rights affected shares?

Then there are the startups which then go IPO. Compellent recently floated. 3Par are planning to. How can these businesses be evaluated (other than by gut instinct) to see whether they are worthwhile?

So, for fun only (which is the main reason for doing this) I will be attempting to review one stock per day, which I will discuss and give my opinion on. I stress - *my opinion*. I could be (and probably will be!) wrong, however those I believe are worth investing in, I will start a "fantasy" investment portfolio just to see how things go!

If you have any opinions or comments, feel free to add them. The first company under review tomorrow will be Seagate.