Seagate Refreshes Enterprise SSD, HDD Lines

Seagate is unveiling five new storage drives in what it calls the industry's largest-scale enterprise launch in years. The roll-out includes two solid-state drives (SSDs) in its Tier 0 (hot data) Pulsar family, two new products in the Tier-1 Savvio hard-disk drive (HDD) line and the 3TByte Constellation ES Tier 2 near-line drive. The company says that the new offerings bring new features, reliability and/or capacities that address different market opportunities, from offering the first multilevel cell (MLC)-enabled SSDs to handling exponential data growth reliably.

Available in 100G, 200G, 400G and 800GByte capacities, the Pulsar.2 is called the first MLC-enabled SSD designed to meet enterprise reliability requirements. The SLC edition, the Pulsar XT.2, comes in 100G, 200G and 400GByte capacities.

The Savvio 15K.3 2.5-inch HDD doubles storage capacity to 300GBytes, while the Savvio 10K.5 comes in 300G, 450G, 600G and 900GByte capacities with 6Gbps SAS and 4Gbps Fibre Channel interface support. The 3.5-inch Constellation ES.2 features RAID Rebuild, which can typically save up to 85 percent of the time required for this function.

Of the three announcements, the most interesting one is the Pulsar announcement, said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst, storage and systems, The 451 Group. "NAND flash SSDs are going to cut into Seagate's high-margin Fibre Channel hard-drive sales, and so far Seagate has not done much in that area. The new Pulsar.2 fills a gap for the lower end of the market, which desires the low cost of MLC-based drives, and on the high end, the Pulsar XT.2 is considerably faster than Seagate's first Pulsar drive."

Company officials claim the enterprise SSD market has been inhibited by a number of factors, including cost, endurance concerns, performance variation and a lack of enterprise-class support. Seagate believes enterprise-class MLC SSDs are needed to drive market adoption, and Baltazar says he tends to agree."Hardware vendors and customers will benefit from having Seagate around as an enterprise-class SSD vendor to challenge rivals such as STEC. Seagate's relationship with these hardware vendors should help them with the qualification process, which typically takes several months to complete."

Seagate's enterprise announcements come just days after Western Digital announced that it will shell out $4.3 billion for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. This deal is expected to enhance Western Digital's enterprise and SSD offerings, and increase the competition between the two biggest drive vendors.

Baltazar said that the deal solidifies Western Digital as the top hard-drive vendor on the market, at least from a market share perspective. "Hitachi GST will help give WD the enterprise credibility that it lacked before. The Hitachi/Intel partnership will also give WD enterprise-class SSDs to take to market. It's still early days for the flash storage market, but clearly we are starting to see more traction and interest in this space."

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Alert: SSDs: Better, Stronger, Faster (subscription required).