In an oddly timed bit of scheduling, HGST Inc., (formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) rolled out a bevy of new products during Apple’s iPhone 6 reveal and Intel’s IDF keynote. One might suspect HGST’s message to be drowned out, but the company had an ace up its sleeve – the world’s first 10TB hard drive.

HGST set the background to its announcements by reminding us that the rate of data growth is doubling every two years, and that the spread of the Internet of Things will only accelerate this, triggering a need for faster data access. And HGST wants to be the one who provides it, hence its bid to become a full-spectrum data storage component supplier, from disks to SSDs to PCIe Flash and even Server SANs.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what HGST announced:

• A new batch of 8TB Helium drives with greater storge density than any other, and the future release of 10TB drives.
• New PCIe SSD products + strategic NAND alliances.
• Support for Server SAN.
• New and greenfield hardware and software systems built with technologies from Western Digital’s Velobit, Virident and sTec acquisitions.

“We are leading the charge to create next-generation data centres that raise the standard for efficiency and reliability, enable faster access to higher volumes of data and allow businesses to extract greater value from the information it holds,” proclaimed HGST President Mike Cordano in a blog post. “[We are] introducing new solutions designed to help manage the increasing volume, velocity, variety and longevity of data in our ever-growing connected world.”

10TB helium-filled hard disks

The biggest news was HGST’s whopping 10TB hard disk packed into a standard 3.5” form factor. HGST combined a couple of cutting-edge technologies to achieve this feat, including shingled magnetic recording (SMR) which lays down tracks in an overlapping fashion. Doing so boosts storage density at the cost of performance penalty attached to modifying data, but this handicap won’t be a problem for enterprise apps that use the drive in an archival capacity.

HGST’s 10TB monster comes hermetically sealed and filled with helium to cut down on internal resistence and turbulence, which means the platters can be stacked closer together. We first saw HGST’s helium-filled HDDs last year, but this is the first time the tech has been combined with SMR.

Cordano said that in future all of HGST’s enterprise drives would be helium-filled. He noted that the sealed environment is also ideal for heat-assisted magnetic recording as well, though HAMR-based drives won’t hit the market till 2017 or later.

HGST also announced two new enterprise drives built using traditional recording technology, including the 8TB Ultrastar He8, which also uses HelioSeal. It comes with seven platters with an areal density of 664Gb/in², a 7,200 RPM spindle speed and SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps interfaces.

The smaller Ultrastar 7K6000 6TB is HGST’s last “in-air” enterprise drive, and comes with five platters but with a slightly higher areal density of 703Gb/in². Also available in 2TB-5TB versions, the 7,200-RPM spindle speed is the same regardless of the capacity, as is the choice of SATA and SAS interfaces.

Flash matters 

HGST’s advancements aren’t just restricted to disk, it’s also getting groovy with Flash. The company announced the Ultrastar SN100 PCIe SSDs with an NVMe interface built using Toshiba NAND chips. The Ultrastar SN100s come with capacities of up to 3.2TB, available in 2.5 inch, half-length and half-height form factors.

HGST says the NVMe extensions enable the software to interface with the SN100s Flash management, which should lead to “two times higher performance and two times better endurance compared to [similar products] without this capability.”

“We expect the new Ultrastar SN100 series to raise the bar by delivering industry-leading performance, including consistent low access latency, as well as enterprise endurance,” said Mike Gustafson, SP and GM of HGST’s Flash Platforms Group, in prepared remarks.

Server SANs

HGST announced Server SAN support based in Virident Space technology. It allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices, providing one or more shared volumes in excess of 38TB of usable storage capacity.

The company describes the clustering as “high-availability and mirrored” with a management GUI that makes it “ideal for shared storage applications like Oracle RAC and Red Hat Gobal File System that traditionally relied on dedicated SAN storage”. It’s also useful for MySQL because “a single stand-by server can be deployed as an alternative to dedicated replication pairs, saving as much as 37 percent on total server count.”

It can be added to Virident Share for Flash pooling and remote access, Virident ClusterCache for SAN acceleration, and Virident HA for replication to form what HGST describes as a “rich and robust flash fabric system”.

With these announcements, HGST is hoping to surpass the other players in the Flash and non-volatile memory component market, and at the same time edge out in front with regard to disk capacity. The company still has to deliver on the vision it’s laid out today, but rivals like Seagate will surely be scrutinizing every aspect of yesterday’s announcement and planning a response.

Watch a live replay of HGST’s announcement here:

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

photo credit: JHox2011 via photopin cc