Seagate Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 SSDs target enterprise, reliability-obsessed consumers

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 without equal enterprise performance, endurance and reliability; two next-generation Savvio® 15K and 10K harddrive drives (HDD) optimized for a balance of high performance and capacity; and the most recent Constellation® ES.2 3TB HDD for pure capacity-optimized mass storage needs.

“The surge in storage consumption is being driven not just by the expansion of content and use throughout the enterprise, but additionally 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 varied storage needs of those high growth application environments, whether it’s fast transactional database servers, bulk storage and archiving, or everything in between.”

“After we increase the chance for storage at any point on the planet wide web, we increase the chance for storage at every point on the earth wide web,” said John Monroe, a research vice chairman in Gartner’s Data Center Systems group. “Media tablets and other smart handheld devices will serve to generate an excellent greater need for big amounts of both high-capacity and high-speed storage within the cloud, so as to in turn require diverse new breeds of storage building blocks to administer this explosive and intricate data growth in additional efficient, reliable and price-effective ways.”

Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 – Pure Performance with Enterprise-Class Endurance

The Pulsar.2 SSD is the 1st MLC-enabled (as much as 800GB) SSD from an enterprise HDD vendor delivering the worth/performance, data integrity, and endurance needed for performance-hungry enterprise applications. Unlike other MLC SSDs which were designed for consumer applications and absence the robust data integrity and endurance feature set required for enterprise applications, the Pulsar.2 SSD has been designed from the bottom up for the enterprise. It has the intelligence to automatically detect and proper a large number of knowledge errors than can occur during normal drive operations to deliver the best 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 can enable adoption of SSDs within the enterprise. The Pulsar.2 supports both native 6Gb/s SAS and SATA 6Gb/s interfaces.

Seagate Pulsar XT.2 Solid State Drive

The Pulsar XT.2 is a 2.5-inch, SLC-based, native 6Gb/s SAS, as much as 400GB enterprise SSD from Seagate, the realm leader in enterprise storage. The Pulsar XT.2 SSD delivers the top levels of consistent performance, data integrity, and drive endurance for probably the most demanding enterprise environments. The Pulsar XT.2 is the fastest drive within 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 global basis. Over 200 man-years of development went into the 2nd-generation Pulsar SSD products, with enterprise reliability verified by a team with over 1,500 collective years of expertise inside the storage industry. And with a nil.44% AFR and a pair of million hour MTBF rating, the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 provide the storage reliability that enterprise data centers can expect. The Pulsar XT.2 is currently shipping to OEMs. Both the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 can be generally available to the channel beginning Q2 of this year.

“HP continues to look 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 vp of selling. “HP continues to peer 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

Savvio 15K.3 HDD

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 two.5-inch enterprise small form factor has transitioned to becoming the shape 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 bigger capacity and use of the most recent 6Gb SAS interface, Savvio HDDs ultimately help provide IT data centers with improved storage efficiency.

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

The Savvio 15K.3 is the best performing HDD available and is optimized for tier 1 storage applications. With capacities available at 300GB and 146GB, Savvio 15K.3 is easily-fitted to performance-oriented systems which may remain cost-effective to IT budgets and fit a variety of applications.

Savvio 10K.5 HDD

“Dell is calling forward to launching Seagate’s new Savvio® 2.5 inch form factor hard drives. This will likely enhance our line of servers and storage systems, that are designed for the price-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 global-class enterprise server and storage systems using Seagate Savvio® HDDs may also help drive business needs forward while delivering an awesome 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. Additionally they feature Protection Information for enhanced data integrity and a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) option for the security of knowledge-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 hot Constellation ES.2 HDD packs the best capacity into an enterprise-class drive, providing the efficiencies demanded by capacity-intensive 24/7 applications, making it ideal for cost-effective-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 as much as 114TB per square foot.

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

Seagate Constellation ES.2 3TB HDD

The Constellation ES.2 HDD leverages Seagate’s unparalleled expertise in enterprise technology by delivering the very best capacity, fifth-generation 3.5-inch drive on the lowest operating power, helping to maximise energy efficiency within 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 safeguarding 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 which could deliver a mixture of high I/O performance and highly reliable, dense storage for his or her technical computing and archive solutions,” said Jose Reinoso, vp of Storage Engineering at SGI. “Seagate’s Constellation® ES family of HDDs provides this critical combination of storage benefits to maximise 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 likely one of the strongest growth and revenue areas for our business,” said Steve Ichinaga, senior vice chairman 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 quite a lot of expanded opportunities, including systems built for growing nearline storage and cloud environments.”

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