Storage Adviser | Mario Apicella » TAG: Small form factor drives

May 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Storage that takes care of itself

TAGS: Small form factor drives

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: SFF (small form factor) drives allow you to squeeze more spindles into the same rack space, giving you better performance in the same real estate. As an bonus, using 2.5-inch drives reduces the amount of electricity you use and creates less heat than using their larger cousins, essentially making your storage array less demanding on your wallet and on the electric grid.

Naysayers will object that SFF drives cannot compete when capacity is the main objective. True, with a maximum capacity of 500GB, SFF drives deliver half of what 3.5-inch drives offer, but this concern can be trumped by other considerations -- less weight and fewer vibrations transmitted to the enclosure, for example.

Atrato, which shipped its first product earlier this year, has added yet another trump card to the SFF array game, security. But before l lift the lid on Atrato's new security play, let me familiarize you with its array, the V1000.

The V1000 is a 3U, locked enclosure that can host up to 160 2.5-inch SATA drives. Atrato locks its enclosure to make drive replacements impossible, thereby eliminating any human error while identifying which one out of all those drives could have failed. The vendor has instead devised a system to compensate for drive failures with spare capacity set aside at deployment time. Atrato backs up its faith in the self-healing capabilities of its V1000 with a three-year hardware warranty, during which time Atrato expects no array maintenance will be needed.

With 320GB drives, you get a raw capacity of just more than 51TB per enclosure. Usable capacity, however, varies according to the level of resilience you want. According to Atrato CEO Dan McCormick, customers typically set aside 12.5 percent of the enclosure's total capacity for it to tap in the event that the V1000's software can't repair a failed drive.

Atrato has named its architecture SAID (self-maintaining array of identical disks); no surprises there, and one more acronym for your enjoyment.

To further improve the resilience of the V1000 you can set two-way and three-way striping-mirroring RAID plus RAID 50. The combination of failed-drive reserves and RAID cuts down the capacity available to the application appreciably, but it's the price you pay for data safety.

As for performance, Atrato says the V1000 allows you to stream 3,000 movies without a hiccup from its 3U enclosure; competing solutions with similar performance usually fill up a rack or two. I haven't had a chance to review the unit yet, but I'll let you know whether its performance lives up to the company's namesake, a river in Colombia that has a rather impressive water flow.

The 11,000 IOPS that Atrato claims on the same configuration are less impressive, which could be one of the reasons why the vendor is targeting HPC customers and staying away, at least for now, from the crowded, cutthroat transactional space. Which is a pity because in addition to the V1000's three-year maintenance-free period and its excellent performance/space ratio, Atrato claims up to 80 percent reduction in cooling, electricity, and connectivity cost -- savings that could have a significant impact on the budget of many corporate datacenters, not to mention the environment.

Of course, while trumpeting the V1000's strong points, the company has been less than forthcoming on other aspects of the solution. For example, I find from the online specs on the Atrato site that the V1000 also includes a controller, a 2U unit that mounts FC connectivity to the host system and SAS ports facing the storage array, but that PDF file says very little, if anything, about memory, processors mounted, and software capability, for example.

During our briefing, McCormick was noticeably less eloquent when I asked for more details about the V1000 (price, for example), but he did volunteer that Atrato is working on adding more intelligence, more diversified connectivity, and additional application capabilities in future versions.

For now, Atrato has equipped the V1000 with an important feature that no other storage vendors can claim: full drive encryption, which makes the enclosure a trusted vault for storing sensitive data and copyrighted material without affecting performance.

A quick look at the Atrato job-posting site shows that the company is still filling its ranks with technical engineers -- another indication that Atrato is serious about upping the V1000 ante.

Posted by Mario Apicella on May 2, 2008 03:00 AM

April 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

"Diskosaurs" bite back

TAGS: Small form factor drives

In last week's Storage Adviser, I argued in favor of reducing your enterprise storage footprint, championing the energy and space consumption benefits of replacing 3.5-inch "diskosaurs" with SFF (small form factor) drives.

Well, it appears the diskosaurs are biting back, as four Seagate 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives landed in my lab. The 3.5-inch drives, which Seagate will make available next week, are packed with features that remind you why large-form-factor drives still have a significant role to play when capacity and manufacturing flexibility are the major concerns.

The new large Barracuda
Similarly to other members of the family, this new addition to the Barracuda ES.2 offers both SAS and SATA connectivity. Moreover, the ES.2 can be equipped with dual connectivity, which makes the drive able to remain connected if one controller fails in a two-controllers setting.

If you are serious about building some real capacity, I am told that you can take home these megadrives for $300 each, but resellers always have the last say and the additional SAS connectivity will likely make a difference in the price.

Anyway, these are not drives for the DIYers, and I suspect that the bulk of shipments will go to array vendors. In fact, with the ES.2 line of Barracuda drives, Seagate gives storage array vendors increased manufacturing flexibility, and this latest addition is no exception. For example, the 1TB ES.2 drive can fit in the same enclosures that mount fast 15,000rpm Cheetah with minimal manufacturing changes, which allows vendors to offer the same box as a fast-performing unit, a mammoth repository, or a combination of the two.

Seagate did not say which of its customers will jump first to install the new 1TB drives, so I won't speculate on any array model, but it's easy to see how filling all the slots of a 2U 12-drive enclosure will result in an impressive 12TB of nominal capacity that customers can use for Tier 2 or Tier 3 data.

At boot, my LSI controller listed 931GB capacity for each Barracuda ES.2 drive, which gave me a total volume well above 2TB, exceeding the reach of conventional MBR formatting. In fact, the resulting volume had to be initialized in my Windows Server 2003 machine as a GPT drive.

From my first tests, the Barracuda ES.2 proved not only fast but also -- in line with other family members -- only moderately thirsty for electricity, requiring a little more than 12 watts per drive when idle, according to my power meter.

The lure of going small remains strong
Despite the promise of this new entry into the large-form-factor market, don't expect me to abandon the upside of going small. Actually, the opposite is true, because now I have another example of that trend to look into. Here is why.

Xyratex this week announced the SP1224s, a 2U enclosure that mounts 24 2.5-inch drives, a first for the OEM. I don't have a prototype in my lab yet, but looking at this picture, it's easy to see that Xyratex provides the same disk density as Infortrend, 12 drives for each rack unit, but does so using a different drive orientation.

According to this blowup, the array can mount drives up to 146GB, which amounts to a respectable capacity for a full house, well over 3TB, although minuscule when compared to what 12 1TB Barracudas can provide in the same 2U.

And yet, that striking difference in capacity has not changed my mind because it's unlikely that customers will need the largest capacity and the most extreme performance in the same enclosure. With that in mind, the most energy- and space-efficient approach to storage today is to carefully combine arrays with SFF drives for speed, and arrays with large drives for capacity.

Unfortunately, it may take some time for vendors to agree on this simple and perhaps inconvenient truth.

Posted by Mario Apicella on April 4, 2008 03:00 AM

March 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Time to bury big-drive "diskosaurs"

TAGS: Small form factor drives

The EonStor B12 from Infortrend represents an intriguing proposition: an enterprise-class storage solution in miniature, built on 2.5-inch SAS drives. One look at this small-form-factor vision of the future, and you'll be reconsidering the long-term viability of behemoth arrays.

When I first heard about the B12, I was drawn to its potential to reduce power consumption, as well as its small footprint. I have since had the opportunity to begin putting the EonStor B12S through its paces. I will publish the results of my testing in a future review. Here, however, are some initial impressions.

First, the array and the drives arrived at my test lab in one box -- something that is not possible with traditional arrays, which must be shipped with disks stored in separate packaging to keep down the total weight of each box. Moreover, the box, which contained one B12 enclosure with two SAS controllers, two power supply systems, two backup batteries, and 12 drives, as well as cables and rack-mounting rails, weighed less than 20 kilograms (about 43 pounds). Miniature, indeed.

Not only does this compactness cut down shipping costs, but it also reduces the impact that shipping the unit has on the environment, when compared with traditional 12-bay systems with large drives.

Of course, most storage arrays move only once or twice in their lifetime. Yet, multiply that one trip by the number of storage devices shipped worldwide every year, and the difference becomes significant.

How significant? Assume an average 3.5-inch drive (with sleigh) weighs 32 ounces and a 2.5-inch drive weighs 10 ounces. Everything else the same, replacing large drives with smaller units reduces the weight of a single enclosure by more than 16 pounds.

Of course, as you can see from this picture of the EonStor B12, not everything stays the same. The B12 takes advantage of the reduced drive size to shrink every other component to scale, including the enclosure (1U tall), power-supply modules, batteries, and fans.

More important is the shrinking effect the EonStor B12 will have on your datacenter energy bills. When idle, the Seagate Savvio 15K, which the B12 mounts, uses 2.6 watts less than a Seagate Cheetah 15K drive with the same capacity, which translates to a total savings of more than 30 watts for a 12-drive array. Over the life span of the array, this relatively small trickle will transform into serious savings. Couple this with more efficient power supply systems, lower overall heat produced, and a denser layout, and you begin to see the overall impact smaller drives can have on your bottom line.

Often I hear the importance of re-engineering power supplies to achieve greater energy efficiency. But unless we replace larger drives with smaller units, tricks such as these will get us only so far. As I see it, re-engineering current systems for smaller-format drives is the easiest, most effective way to make storage more energy friendly.

Of course, my suggestion requires throwing away the old for the new, but that is a path that we are already walking anyway. Whatever is spinning the bits in your datacenter will be ready for the recycling heap sooner than you think. When that day comes, would you rather replace the old system with a similar backbreaking power hog or a lightweight, pro-environment solution based on 2.5-inch drives?

If you have any hesitation answering that question, take a look at this picture of the 520MB Fujitsu M2624FA that is still in my lab -- I am a pack rat, I know.

Would you want this diskosaur in your system? Obviously not, but don't get confused: The 3.5-inch drives that vendors are shoving down your throat are equally obsolete. The only thing that keeps them alive is their seemingly endless ability to devour ever more data with every new model. I say it's time to look at storage from a different perspective and stop the capacity race -- or at least not make it the driving factor in dictating the design of storage arrays.

Think I am way off? Well, I am bound to secrecy for now, but expect to see another major vendor soon join Infortrend in leading the small-form-factor revolution in storage.

In the meantime, consider this: The B12 is happily idling in my lab at 238 watts. Care to measure how much juice your 3.5-inch-drive arrays are slurping?

Posted by Mario Apicella on March 28, 2008 03:00 AM