SAN and NAS storage solutions need to provide high capacity storage for business critical applications, while delivering superior ROI in high data growth environments. Let's see how Toshiba Enterprise Capacity HDDs enable SAN and NAS solutions to enhance the value of enterprise applications and their digital assets, while reduce Opex and scaling storage capacity.
Growing Capacity Requirements
Hard disk drive vendors have responded by increasing spindle capacities to enable more efficient storage scaling and higher capacity per drive slot. This reduces the number of spindles to manage, while lowering power and storage administrative costs, and increasing storage density per rack.
Growing spindle capacities can turbocharge scale-up and scale-out storage value. For example, larger SATA drives in JBOD applications can provide greater backup / archive capacity, enabling higher frequency backups and longer data retention periods. Larger SAS drives in RAID applications can provide more capacity for carving LUNs, enabling greater LUN sizes and more LUNs for a given RAID set.
Toshiba Enterprise Capacity 6TB* HDDs feature “Advanced Format” boosting format efficiencies utilizing the 4Kn sector size to optimize capacity per spindle. This enables system builders to deliver storage solutions that minimize drive slots, while reducing rack footprint and power/cooling expenses with higher TB/W.
Overcoming Spindle Capacity Limitations
As capacities increase, RAID rebuild times can become an issue. For example in scale-up storage, RAID rebuild typically recreates data from within the same storage node, and may require longer RAID rebuild times for higher capacity HDDs.
However, interest is growing in the upcoming “RAID rebuild assist” feature which is intended to significantly reduce rebuild time by recreating only the corrupted data and copying the balance. To help facilitate deployments, industry technical committees have worked to standardize this feature to help promote adoption.
Alternatively, for scale-out storage, erasure coding eliminates RAID rebuild by reconstructing corrupted data using chunks from other storage nodes, which is well suited for archive and large-scale object storage use cases.
Toshiba Advantage
Toshiba Enterprise Capacity HDDs enable storage solution vendors to provide their customers scalable, high capacity storage with a low TCO. Storage vendors who want to optimize their products for their customers would benefit from Toshiba Enterprise Capacity HDDs.
*Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft Operating System and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.