Seagate's Enterprising Drives
Seagate's Enterprising Drives
June 8th, 2006: A slew of announcements from Seagate sees the venerable storage vendor attacking all areas from the Enterprise to the home user with larger capacity and in-built encryption.
While local pricing is still not available, the drives starting at the Enterprise level, are the Savvio 10K.2 and Barracuda ES. The Savvio is a 2.5-inch unit of up to 146Gb capacity and, the company claims, a world-record 1.6 million hour MTBF (mean time between failure). Importantly for data centres under additional infrastructure costs, it also claims a 15% reduction in power consumption over previous versions. The drive is available in 3Gb Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 4Gb Fibre Channel.
The 7200RPM, SATA (Serial ATA) Barracuda ES scales to 750GB capacity and is being targeted at both RAID sub-systems and external storage. It features, Rotational Vibration Feed Forward(RVFF) technology and 'Workload Management' - a feature that helps protect the hard drive when thermal temperatures begin rising dueto sustained heavy workloads, helping to keep drives and systems cool.
The Barracuda ES can be configured for 3Gb Serial ATA (SATA) (with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 8/16MB cache. Using perpendicular recording technology, the Barracuda ES is offered in capacities of 250, 400, 500, and 750Gb; and a 2Gb FC version in capacities of 400 and 500GB.
Out of the enterprise, and along with a range of drives aimed at the home user, Seagate is also approaching the issue of that has been plaguing organisations, data lost or stolen from laptops. Its Momentus 5400.2 FDE laptop drive (the number refers to its speed) features full disc encryption, securely performing all cyptographic operations and key management within the drive. For users, only a password is needed to self-authenticate for full drive access, while third-party enhancements enable thumb print and smart card options for multi-factor self-authentication. In addition, no time-consuming disc initialization or configuration is required to deploy the encrypting drive.
Supporting this function are:
Highest level of data protection (AES 128-bit encryption) for data at rest.
Encryption speed that matches the throughput of the drive interface to preserve system performance.
Superior system performance and battery life to software-based disc encryption.Quick erase, or scrubbing, of drives that are repurposed or retired.
Preboot authentication gives users secure access to their notebook data.
Full Trusted Platform Module (TPM) support for local cryptographic key backup and archive, providing key management capabilities for individual users to large organizations.
Finally, from the point of view of IDM readers, the Mirra Sync and Share Personal Server add Apple Macintosh connectivity in 320GB and 500GB capacities. The server allows remote access to data, enabling sync, share and protect data between PC and Macs.
Related Article:
Seagate Releases 750Gb Beast