Background

With the explosion of user-generated content proliferating in the workplace and with strict government regulations regarding electronic record keeping, storing all of this data for a reasonable cost is becoming an ever-increasing problem for enterprises. Add to that the “green initiatives” pushing companies to reduce power, and the issue of storage becomes even more daunting.

DataDirect Networks (DDN), founded in 1988, is a leading global supplier of storage systems specifically designed for large capacity and high-bandwidth applications. Its answer to this storage dilemma is the S2A storage  appliance, which was purpose-built  to simplify management, improve performance and scalability, and lower capital acquisition costs of storage. S2A is designed specifically for bandwidth-driven performance and scalable capacity required by modern applications that generate, consume and move very large quantities of data.

S2A storage systems are deployed by several leading Internet, media, oil and gas, and financial firms, as well as on several of the fastest computers in the world, including six of the top 10. DDN’s customers include Shutterfly, AOL, Ascent Media, CGGVeritas and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The Challenge: Increase Storage Capacity and Use Less Power

The S2A product line has always sold well, but DDN realized that customers were looking for even greater capacities. Customers were also looking for solutions to help with power consumption in their storage environments.

“For several years, we have seen a shift in the nature of data being created. The types of applications that people are working with generate and use very large files,” said Josh Goldstein, Vice President of Product Marketing. “This requires a completely different approach to designing a storage system to optimize it around those kinds of environments.”

For its SATA-based S2A systems, DDN has customers that need storage capacities ranging from 100 TB to systems that scale up to multiple petabytes. It has customers that, behind a single S2A appliance, are able to store just about one petabyte to those that, in a single system that can encompass multiple appliances, have scaled up to more than 10 petabytes.

The Solution: 1 TB Ultrastar Drive

Enter the Hitachi Global Storage Technologies’ Ultrastar A7K1000 one-terabyte drive.

“Hitachi was first-to-market and that was a big deal for us,” said Goldstein.  “For us, part of the positioning of our product is having the best storage density, how much capacity can we deliver in one rack of a storage system. So, this helps us maintain that advantage.”

The Ultrastar A7K1000 delivers one terabyte of storage capacity in a standard 3.5-inch form factor, filling a vital need for high-density storage in the enterprise. It continues to set the standard in enterprise-class reliability and performance for lower duty cycle enterprise applications.

The Ultrastar A7K1000 allows for configuration scalability and is ideal for use in mixed-drive environments. In multidrive environments, rotational vibration – which results from the vibration of neighboring drives in a system – can degrade hard drive performance. To aid in maintaining high performance, the Ultrastar A7K1000 incorporates enhanced Rotational Vibration Safeguard technology, providing up to 50 percent improvement over the previous generation against performance degradation, leading the industry.

“Having a terabyte drive come out and being able to use it in an existing system is really important to our customers,” Goldstein said. “Every generation of drivehas a better dollar-per-terabyte point, which makes them an attractive option.”

DDN will also take advantage of the Ultrastar’s low-power consumption by offering a sleep or standby mode in future releases.

“You’ll be able to have multipetabyte archives of data that, if you’re not actively accessing, the drives can spin down, but the electronics are still on,” Goldstein said. “In this mode, they consume very little power, but can still be spun up rapidly if data needs to be accessed. In our S2A storage arrays, which scale to 960 drives behind each appliance, you can save quite a bit of power and still have the array be responsive when you need to spin the drives up.”

Results

DDN’s S2A systems began shipping with the Ultrastar A7K1000 in July and have been sold to companies in all kinds of different environments. Customers include Internet content players; digital Hollywood (where they're archiving high-definition video and film that has been digitized); corporations that are doing large-scale backup and archiving of massive amounts of information and have to keep it readily available and protected. The S2A is also used in high-performance computing and supercomputing where there are clusters of servers that can scale up into more than 100,000 CPUs – all trying to access a common pool of storage at the same time.

“The S2A with the Ultrastar A7K1000 is going to very quickly account for the bulk of our SATA shipments,” Goldstein said.