Seagate Unveils Enterprise Solid-State and Hard Drives

Seagate Technology announced its latest enterprise solid-state and hard disk drives.

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Unedited press release follows:

Seagate Raises The Bar In Enterprise Storage: Unveils Groundbreaking SSD And HDD Solutions

Solutions range from cutting-edge, performance-optimized Pulsar® solid state drives, to performance and capacity-balanced Savvio® hard drives, to capacity-optimized Constellation® hard drives

March 15, 2011 – Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX) today announced its latest enterprise solutions designed to deliver storage for the widest range of application environments. Joining the industry’s most award-winning enterprise lineup, these solutions include: two new members of the Pulsar® Solid State Drive (SSD) family that deliver the ultimate enterprise performance, endurance and reliability; two next-generation Savvio® 15K and 10K hard disk drives (HDD) optimized for a balance of high performance and capacity; and the latest Constellation® ES.2 3TB HDD for pure capacity-optimized mass storage needs.

“The surge in storage consumption is being driven not only by the growth of content and use within the enterprise, but also by new applications and devices that directly or indirectly consume enterprise storage,” said Kurt Richarz, Seagate EVP of Product Line Management. “Seagate’s new family of enterprise storage solutions meets the diverse storage needs of these high growth application environments, whether it’s fast transactional database servers, bulk storage and archiving, or everything in between.”

“When we increase the possibility for storage at any point in the world wide web, we increase the possibility for storage at every point in the world wide web,” said John Monroe, a research vice president in Gartner’s Data Center Systems group. “Media tablets and other smart handheld devices will serve to generate an even greater need for enormous amounts of both high-capacity and high-speed storage in the cloud, which will in turn require diverse new breeds of storage building blocks to manage this explosive and complex data growth in more efficient, reliable and cost-effective ways.”

Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 – Pure Performance with Enterprise-Class Endurance
The Pulsar.2 SSD is the first MLC-enabled, (up to 800GB) SSD from an enterprise HDD vendor delivering the price/performance, data integrity, and endurance needed for performance-hungry enterprise applications. Unlike other MLC SSDs that have been designed for consumer applications and lack the robust data integrity and endurance feature set required for enterprise applications, the Pulsar.2 SSD has been designed from the ground up for the enterprise. It has the intelligence to automatically detect and correct a multitude of data errors than can occur during normal drive operations to deliver the highest levels of enterprise-class data integrity and endurance. By enabling MLC NAND technology for the enterprise, this drive addresses the market concerns on SSD cost and endurance and will enable adoption of SSDs in the enterprise. The Pulsar.2 supports both native 6Gb/s SAS and SATA 6Gb/s interfaces.

The Pulsar XT.2 is a 2.5-inch, SLC-based, native 6Gb/s SAS, up to 400GB enterprise SSD from Seagate, the world leader in enterprise storage. The Pulsar XT.2 SSD delivers the highest levels of consistent performance, data integrity, and drive endurance for the most demanding enterprise environments. The Pulsar XT.2 is the fastest drive in the Seagate portfolio, with sustainable random reads at 48K and writes at 22K IOPS and sequential reads at 360MB/sec and writes at 300MB/sec. The Pulsar XT.2 is optimized for real world, complex, mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments.

Both the Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 drives leverage Seagate’s leadership in meeting enterprise customer expectations in product development, qualification, fulfillment and ongoing support on a worldwide basis. Over 200 man-years of development went into the 2 nd-generation Pulsar SSD products, with enterprise reliability verified by a team with over 1,500 collective years of experience in the storage industry. And with a 0.44% AFR and 2 million hour MTBF rating, the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 provide the storage reliability that enterprise data centers can count on. The Pulsar XT.2 is currently shipping to OEMs. Both the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 will be generally available to the channel beginning Q2 of this year.

“HP continues to see new opportunities for solid state storage technology as customers increase virtual system workloads, needing higher performance while reducing power requirements,” said Jim Ganthier, HP Industry Standard Software and Systems vice president of Marketing. “HP continues to look forward to storage technology advances from Seagate including wider SSD enablement across HP systems and workloads.”

Savvio 15K.3 and Savvio 10K.5 – Greater IT Storage Efficiency
Seagate’s latest-generation Savvio 2.5-inch small form factor enterprise class HDDs are built to deliver high performance, reliability, and capacity for tier 1, mission-critical server and storage systems. The 2.5-inch enterprise small form factor has transitioned to becoming the form factor of choice over 3.5-inch, with Savvio drives further maximizing data center capabilities without increasing footprint. By unifying an optimal small form factor size with higher performance and greater capacity and use of the latest 6Gb SAS interface, Savvio HDDs ultimately help provide IT data centers with improved storage efficiency.

The Savvio 10K.5 delivers the world’s highest capacity in a 2.5-inch mission-critical HDD with up to 900GB, enabling easier and more flexible storage upgrades to create high capacity, high performance systems. As the only 2.5-inch 10K-rpm drive family to provide four capacity points (900GB, 600GB, 450GB, 300GB) on a single platform, and a choice of 6Gb/s SAS or 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces, the Savvio 10K.5 delivers the scalability and versatility that OEMs, system builders, and end users need.

The Savvio 15K.3 is the highest performing HDD available and is optimized for tier 1 storage applications. With capacities available at 300GB and 146GB, Savvio 15K.3 is well-suited for performance-oriented systems that can remain cost-effective to IT budgets and fit a wide range of applications.

“Dell is looking forward to launching Seagate’s new Savvio® 2.5 inch form factor hard drives. This will enhance our line of servers and storage systems, which are designed for the cost-conscious IT professional who requires a balance of capacity, performance, and reliability,” said Michael Mitoma, executive director of Storage Engineering at Dell. “Dell’s range of world-class enterprise server and storage systems using Seagate Savvio® HDDs can help drive business needs forward while delivering a great return for our customers’ IT investment.”

The Savvio 10K.5 and Savvio 15K.3 both deliver a record reliability rating of .44% AFR/2 million hours MTBF and include a 5-year warranty. They also feature Protection Information for enhanced data integrity and a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option for the protection of data-at-rest. Both Savvio models are currently shipping to OEMs, with channel availability for Savvio 10K.5 beginning Q1 and Savvio 15K.3 to follow in Q2.

Constellation ES.2 –Highest Capacity Enterprise Drive from the Nearline Market Leader
The new Constellation ES.2 HDD packs the highest capacity into an enterprise-class drive, providing the efficiencies demanded by capacity-intensive 24/7 applications, making it ideal for low cost-per-GB highly-valued business storage solutions. With massive 3TB capacities, the Constellation ES.2 HDD powers both server and bulk storage solutions, maximizing the storage footprint by supporting up to 114TB per square foot.

Constellation ES.2 also introduces a new Seagate RAID Rebuild™ feature for enterprise HDDs. With large capacity drives comes longer RAID recovery times, but with the new Seagate RAID Rebuild development platform, customers can significantly reduce hours of lost productivity during RAID recoveries.

The Constellation ES.2 HDD leverages Seagate’s unparalleled expertise in enterprise technology by delivering the highest capacity, fifth-generation 3.5-inch drive at the lowest operating power, helping to maximize energy efficiency in the data center. Building on Seagate’s enterprise leadership with its 3 rd generation SAS interface, the Constellation ES.2 also features the SAS-based Protection Information feature for end-to-end data protection, Self-Encrypted Drive (SED) option for protecting data-at-rest, best-in-class Rotational Vibration Feed Forward (RVFF) technology that sustains performance when placed in closely-packed multi-drive system environments, and PowerChoice™ on-demand low power options that keeps drives and systems running cool.

“SGI’s customers require systems that can deliver a combination of high I/O performance and highly reliable, dense storage for their technical computing and archive solutions,” said Jose Reinoso, vice president of Storage Engineering at SGI. “Seagate’s Constellation® ES family of HDDs provides this critical combination of storage benefits to maximize our customers’ productivity and helps SGI maintain its leadership in delivering world-class systems.”

“Capacity-optimized drives are in high demand with our customer base and this category is among the strongest growth and revenue areas for our business,” said Steve Ichinaga, senior vice president and general manager of Systems Integration Division at SYNNEX. “Seagate’s 3TB Constellation® ES will expand our customers’ ability to deliver greater value storage for a number of expanded opportunities, including systems built for growing nearline storage and cloud environments.”

The Constellation ES.2 is offered in both 6Gb/s Serial ATA (SATA) and 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces. It is currently shipping to OEMs and will be available in the channel Q2 this year.

About Seagate
Seagate is the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions.