Toshiba – Bringing High-Capacity Disk to Store Large Volumes of Data Cost-Effectively
You may have noticed that the terminologies that once clearly delineated the traditional storage tiers are not as neatly defined as they once were.
The Value is in “The Data”…
As compute power has become more affordable, the ability to extract actionable information from “data” - and from the “data-about-the-data” – have become more essential to organizational competitiveness. Technologies like software-defined storage, data analytics, and – wait for it - Enterprise Capacity disk drives – are delivering a broad range of possibilities for the utilization of storage tiers.
What we used to narrowly define as “nearline storage” now applies to concepts like “data lakes” and “cloud storage” and “compliance archives” and “asset libraries” and traditional notion of storage systems dedicated to “business continuity” (fail-over, back-up and restore). Indeed, what we think of as “nearline storage” is required today for any collection of “data” required to serve the operational mission. Low-cost, public cloud storage service providers make use of vast deployments of Enterprise Capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) to host reliable, enterprise-grade storage capacity that is available on demand.
Enterprise Capacity Hard Drives are the Workhorse of the Digital Economy
Cost-effective Enterprise Capacity disk drives are at the heart of today’s on-premise and public cloud infrastructure. These HDDs deliver enterprise-grade capacity at pennies per gigabyte prices, enabling valuable data to be accessed with reasonable speed and with enterprise-grade data reliability.
Enterprise storage systems today may combine traditional storage technology tiers within the same “box” by pairing Enterprise Capacity nearline-class HDDs with traditional 15Krpm and 10Krpm Enterprise Performance HDDs and with enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs). The growing popularity of “hybrid storage arrays,” demonstrates the value “storage tiering” brings to the marketplace.
Capacity in the Cloud
Today, businesses of all sizes need to access and manage Petabytes of data. To do this cost-effectively, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are leveraging scale-out storage infrastructure to deliver reliable, low-cost cloud storage-as-a-service.
Since these scale-out systems typically have higher densities and lower cooling and power requirements than “hotter” storage systems where the disks are constantly spinning, typical cloud-based scale-out nearline storage tends to be utilized for systems and applications that are less transaction-intensive.
- Servers and scalable high-density rack deployments
For applications such as: traditional data center, CSP (on premise private, hybrid, public), email/web hosting services, file storage, energy and research, virtualized computing
- Non-transactional storage workloads
Workloads moving large amounts of data such as big data analytics, content delivery and distribution (media and entertainment), data protection, data backup, data archiving
- Image retrieval, VOD and Streaming Media
Images or videos that are accessed less frequently and can be subject to small delays; access may involve manual or automated intervention
Toshiba and Nearline
Hard drive manufacturers are placing more emphasis now on designing for high storage density. Large-scale data centers are benefitting from the use of high-capacity HDD technology. So for instance, high-capacity 8TB Enterprise Capacity drives not only provide a 33% bump in capacity over a 6TB drive, but do so within the same footprint and with no increase in power consumption. Ready to make the change? With more than 40 years of storage innovation and expertise, Toshiba’s broad portfolio of proven storage products include solutions to meet your nearline workloads.
Definition of capacity: 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.