Seagate today introduced its Constellation™ family ofnew enterprise storage solutions for Tier 2 nearline storage applications. The two new drive models, the 2.5-inch Constellation and the 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drives, include a combination of features that enable high capacities, increased power efficiency, enterprise-class reliability, and data security. Both drives also include PowerChoice™ from Seagate, which decreases power consumption by up to 54% for record power savings in enterprise environments.

The Constellation 2.5-inch hard drive is offered in capacities of 160GB and 500GB with both 3 Gbps SATA and new SAS 2.0 interface running at 6Gb/s speeds. As the first SAS 2.0 nearline drive, the Constellation hard drive enables larger external storage topologies, 100% faster data throughput and higher signal strength over greater distances – dramatically increasing storage scalability. The Constellation family will begin shipping this quarter.

“Dell recognizes that increased capacity and high-reliability are key toenabling further adoption of small form factor storage within the enterprise. With new capacities, small form factor drives afford customers performance and power gains within the same rack space,” said Praveen Asthana, director of Dell Storage.

“As an industry-leader in storage, Dell is pleased to partner with Seagate and be one of the first companies to offer the Constellation family of drives to our customers.”

Constellation ES
The 3.5-inch Constellation ES hard drive will be available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities, and with an enterprise-class SAS interface as well as a SATA version, and provides best-in-class capacity and performance. As the world’s only 7200-rpm 3.5-inch hard drive providing up to 2TB of storage, the record-setting capacity of Constellation ES hard drives are ideal for 3.5-inch based external storage architectures. With Constellation ES hard drives, customers don’t have to sacrifice performance in order to gain the highest capacities. The Constellation ES hard drive will ship in calendar Q3.

“Xyratex continues to work closely with Seagate to advance storage system innovation to meet both the performance and capacity-based market requirements,” said Todd Gresham, executive vice president and general manager of the Networked Storage Solutions Division for Xyratex. The new Constellation family of products complements Xyratex’s philosophy of delivering cost-effective enterprise-class, energy efficient storage solutions that help provide our customers the long-term investment protection they demand.”

With Seagate’s innovative PowerChoice technology, both Constellation hard drive models deliver the highest power-reduction savings ever offered in an enterprise-class HDD, and provide flexible, user-manageable options to deliver power savings without sacrificing performance, data integrity, or reliability. In addition, the Constellation family of drives are backed with field-proven, enterprise-grade reliability and rated at a full 1.2 million hours MTBF.

Delivering on Seagate’s commitment to add security features throughout its product portfolio, the Constellation family of drives are offered with optional self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and provide government-grade data security through the drive’s life cycle. SED technology makes drive retirement and disposal easy by eliminating the need for the numerous manual processes involved which are often incomplete, complex, expensive, or prone to error. For critical information that must remain secure, and because all systems are eventually retired, whether being relocated, re-purposed, or disposed of, the information on a Constellation SED hard drive remains AES-safe.

Seagate Unified Storage™ architecture delivers long-term business sustainability
Historically, the variety of drive interfaces, form factors and now, security solutions, can add complexity and increase costs for both IT professionals and OEMs. Making the wrong choice today creates storage islands in the data center with no easy path for upgrades – further complicating an already complex environment. The Seagate Unified Storage architecture converges best-of-breed technologies (Serial Attached SCSI, Small Form Factor and Self-Encrypting Drives) into a foundation for powerful yet simple storage that boosts business and operational efficiency while reducing cost and complexity.

The Seagate Unified Storage architecture delivers a storage foundation for companies that are proactively ensuring the long-term sustainability of their business through best-in-class IT practices. Companies will avoid the risk of impacting their own product quality, competitiveness, or profitability when their storage system infrastructure and data center footprint is optimized across power, cooling and performance density. Because the role of small form factor drives are important to the long-term efficiency and sustainability of any data center enterprise, Seagate will be extending this component into all tiers of its Unified Storage architecture in the future.

“With tightening IT budgets, Seagate is committed to delivering enterprise-class nearline storage solutions that ensure business sustainability by optimizing resources, reducing environment, energy or social impact and satisfying customer requirements without compromising performance,” said Sherman Black, senior vice president, Seagate Core Marketing and Strategy. “These new Constellation HDDs provide business continuity in the data center by offering the highest capacities, the lowest power, and the latest in enterprise-class data integrity with SAS 2.0 and AES government-grade encryption.”

Late last week Western Digital briefed us on their forthcoming release of a new addition to their Caviar Green family of hard drives. No we're not talking some sort of exotic sushi or cracker-bound fish egg here either but rather a new, rather humongous and environmentally more friendly hard drive from WD, that can be considered an "industry first". Today marks the day that standard rotational media breaks the 2TB barrier. Let's spell that out a bit more clearly again here; T-W-O full Terabytes of SATA-based storage on a single, standard 3.5" hard drive. Those of you on the consumer side of the market, hording gigs of music, movies, pictures and other media just got a bunch more breathing room to play with. And those of you in the enterprise space now have a new option to consider with respect to bulk, low-cost, power-efficient storage. Perhaps that rack just got a little smaller or the need to cool it a little less?

Today Western Digital is announcing their WD20EADS drive, otherwise known as the WD Caviar Green 2.0TB. With 32MB ofonboard cache and special power management algorithms that balance spindle speed and transfer rates, the WD Caviar Green 2TB claims a top rung spot on the density-per-square-inch and power-efficiency ladders.

We've had an engineering sample here in house for a few days and have done some preliminary testing on it. We'll be offering a full performance evaluation with the final revision of this new drive in the coming weeks but we have a sneak peek for you here. Let's start with the specifications and then we'll take a closer look at the vital signs.
Specs:

* Capacity: 2TB (400Gb/sq.in. areal density)
* 32MB cache buffer
* Variable spindle speed
* 3.5-inch form-factor
* 500GB/platter, 4-platter design
* 3Gb/sec SATA with NCQ
* SATA power connector only
* PMR head technology
* RoHS compliant

The storge market is going through major changes these days, with SSDs gaining more and more ground and registering a good market penetration, while HDDs struggle to maintain their position. Undoubtedly, the battle between the two technologies will be a tough and long one, and perhaps they will come to a consensus at a certain moment and will coexist, as we've seen in other IT market areas.

We have had the chance to talk to Siobhan M. Lyons, Seagate Corporate Communications, Consumer Solutions Division, who has been more than kind to answer some of our questions regarding the plans the company has. Also, he has given us an “inside view” on the future of storage industry, confirming some of our thoughts and expectations. Here is the e-mail interview we have had with Mr. Siobhan M. Lyons. Mr. Forrest Monroy, Seagate company spokesperson, should also be credited for the answers we received.

HDD technology has been reportedly advancing towards higher densities, higher storage capacities, faster transfer rates, as well as higher spinning speeds for the platters. How does Seagate see the future of HDDs from this perspective? Seagate: Seagate sees a bright future for HDDs, and storage in general, as digital content continues to proliferate. We've demonstrated advances in technology in HDDs and other complementary technologies, that can provide a path to supply the growing storage density and performance needs of the market past 2020.


Seagate is one of the industry biggest players in the HDD market. How does this go along with the company's switch towards the SSD technology? What is Seagate's vision on the future of storage solutions?

Seagate: Our company is a storage solutions provider and as such is storage agnostic with regard to the type of storage being used. There are some applications that will be best served by HDDs for the long run and some areas where SSDs will prove to be ideal in the future. The key point to note is that SSD technology is not yet the ideal solution for any volume market requirements right now due to a number of reasons, including, but not limited to, cost, endurance, and lack of industry standards. Seagate has dedicated teams working on SSDs, but the key to this, or any other technology, is to enter the market at the right time. It's also critical to be a trusted supplier for not only product quality and performance, but for execution and delivery across the worldwide supply chain. Seagate's expertise in storage delivery and being a trusted supplier is second-to-none. The future will show that there will be co-existence between SSDs and HDDs, and our OEM customers are looking to us to be that trusted supplier that can provide the necessary storage solutions across the board.


When do you expect to deliver Seagate SSDs for both consumer and professional market? Could you detail some of the specifications of the said SSDs?

Seagate: Seagate will be entering the SSD market in 2009 within the enterprise as this is where it makes the most sense for our customer's needs. Our first offerings will be targeted toward being used with the most transaction-intense servers. We will continue to explore consumer and other markets.


Which OS do you think embraces best SSD technology? What can you tell us about your collaboration with Microsoft on making Windows and SSDs play nice together, in the context of today's Vista and the upcoming Windows 7?

Seagate: Microsoft is making a focussed effort to embrace SSD technology as documented most recently at WinHEC 20008. Microsoft introduced several new technology advancements intended to enhance the use of SSD in conjunction with Windows 7.

HDDs and SSDs currently plug into the same storage eco system socket and look the same to the OS - although they should be treated differently with regards to some aspects. Windows 7 will set Defrag off as a default when detecting non-rotating media, improving device endurance by reducing writes. Windows 7 supports the Microsoft implementation of the 'Trim' feature which enables three optimization opportunities for the drive that are: enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks, making early garbage collection possible for fast write, keeping device’s unused storage area as much as possible; there is more room for device wear leveling.

Microsoft also had a panel session at WinHEC 2008 with industry representatives from Intel, Samsung, Sandisk and Seagate with the title "How Windows and SSDs Can Provide the Best User Experience" which indicates that the enabling work for SSDs is not done yet and it seems reasonable to expect further enhancements in the future.

Seagate is working with Microsoft in standards bodies such as JEDEC JC64.8 to build the foundation to a successful growth of the SSD market. Widely adopted industry standards will allow the operating system to best embrace the SSD technology in the future. While standards build the foundation, there is intentionally clearly enough head room for each vendor to differentiate and innovate which Seagate plans to do as well.


What can you share with us on Seagate's upcoming HDD product lineup? What should consumers be looking for the 2008 holiday season?

Seagate: Consumers this season can look forward to seeing our brand new line of FreeAgent product lining the shelves. This new generation of the Seagate® FreeAgent™ family includes attractive desktop and mobile options, for both Mac® and Windows® operated PCs that make it a breeze to back up, share and protect valuable digital content like photos, videos and music. With capacities ranging from 250GB up to 1.5TB, the FreeAgent family provides storage solutions for the everyday consumer, the professional and the photo or music enthusiast.

The FreeAgent line also includes the industry’s slimmest and only dockable, portable drive, the FreeAgent Go. Just in time for the holidays, we will unveil a wide range of new, stylish colors for the FreeAgent Go including pink, red, orange, yellow, Mars green, earth green, royal blue, sky blue, gold, silver or black. With up to 500GB, the FreeAgent Go has enough room to carry entire libraries of movies, music and pictures, making it a great present for all the important people on your holiday shopping list.

Those who either purchase or receive a drive this season will have fun customizing their gift with new content thanks to Seagate’s limited time “Load Me Up” campaign. Starting November 28, owners who register their products will get 50 free songs from eMusic, the second largest digital music service; two free movie rentals through CinemaNow, an innovator in digital entertainment technology; and 50% off of a one-year subscription at SmugMug, the leading photo-sharing destination on the web. The promotion will run through the end of January 2009, allowing people time following the holiday rush to carefully consider and select their favorite content to personalize their FreeAgent Go.


HDDs, as well as SSDs, have been, for a good time now, featured in devices related to home entertainment. How do you expect this market segment to develop in the near future?

Seagate: Our world is becoming increasingly more digital in all aspects. For the first time in 2006, consumption of storage in the home out paced that of enterprise. This has also spurred an increased in the proliferation of digital content capture devices, such as HD camcorders and high-resolution digital cameras. As consumers continue to produce and capture increasing volumes of digital content, they will be looking for ways to expand the capacity of these home entertainment devices with DAS and NAS solutions. Seagate is delivering on these demands with convenient and easy to use products for back up, storage, sharing and security of important files.

We currently offer the Maxtor Central Axis to address this need. Down the line, you’ll see us introduce products that allow our FreeAgent products to be docked into a TV allowing it to stream content for playing in your living room. It will successfully extend the content power of the computer and Internet to the comfort of your couch. We also see the need for and are evaluating product specs for a home storage server that accepts content from various content creation devices - and, presumably, over the net - and then streams it to content playing devices. As the technology becomes easier to use and people become more familiar with the ways in which they can share media on the network, we see that this will be an opportunity for growth in the home.Source : softpedia.com