Seagate has upgraded its Exos Utility Platform storage arrays with a brand new ASIC RAID controller that doubles efficiency and provides what Seagate calls self-healing to protect information on faulty laborious disks.
The Exos X fashions are a rebranding of the outdated Exos AP line. The chassis can maintain a mixture of conventional laborious disks in addition to SSDs. It comes with software program that robotically strikes “scorching” information, which is being continuously accessed, to SSDs, whereas much less used, “chilly” information is moved to the laborious drives.
There are three Exos X merchandise, outlined by their dimension and drive-bay depend. The 2U12 is a 2U chassis with 12 3.5-inch hard-drive bays; the 2U24 with is a 2U chassis has 24 drive slots; and the 5U84 with 84 slots in a 5U chassis. It has all the commonplace connections: SAS, community connected SAS, Fibre Channel as much as 32G, iSCSI as much as 25G and a 10GBASE-T choice as nicely.
The enclosures additionally include Seagate’s new VelosCT controller, which doubles efficiency over the outdated controller with efficiency of as much as 725,000 I/O per second at 1ms latency, sequential learn speeds as much as 12GB/s, and writes at 10GB/s.
The brand new programs additionally make the most of Seagate’s ADAPT (Autonomic Distributed Allocation Safety Expertise) erasure coding know-how, which minimizes data-redundancy overhead and system rebuilds from information loss or drive failure.
Paired with ADAPT is a brand new know-how, ADR (Automated Drive Regeneration), which is the self-healing half. If a tough drive’s learn/write head fails, ADR takes the failed head out of fee however leaves the remaining drive heads operational. This fashion you sacrifice the one platter on the drive as an alternative of the entire drive, as is typical of drive failure. ADAPT then rebuilds the information from the lifeless platter elsewhere.
If a single head is taken out, you would possibly come again with 90% of that capability after the ADR motion is completed, stated Tom DiMauro, product supervisor for storage programs at Seagate. “After which within the background, we add that drive again into the pool seamlessly, so when the operation is full, the information is rebalanced.”
He admits some folks can be leery of leaving a damaged laborious disk deployed in a storage array, however stated this can be a first model of this know-how and that it’ll change into a very essential TCO worth proposition when laborious drives begin reaching 30TB and past within the subsequent a number of years. These drives have as much as 10 platters and 9 nonetheless in use is room for lots of knowledge.
“The power to self-heal a tool and hold the overwhelming majority of that capability in play actually makes for far more environment friendly storage programs. To not point out simply the power of directors to not have to fret about altering out drives as continuously as they do of their information facilities at the moment. I feel it is a huge deal,” he stated.
The Exos X array ships later this month.
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