Seagate unveils 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD

Seagate has announced that its new 12TB helium enterprise drives are now shipping to cloud providers for evaluation. Seagate plans to start volume shipments for production availability in the June quarter of 2017. The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 12TB incorporates several technology advancements developed to address a critical requirement hyper-scale customers face in this age of exponential data growth: the ability to locate and organize the increasing amount of unstructured data they possess and make it available quickly and reliably for customers.

Seagate’s new 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is precision engineered to accommodate 550TB workloads annually. It has a market-leading MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2.5 million hours and is designed to operate 24/7 for five years in the most rigorous enterprise data center environments, delivering for greater reliability and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise storage products in the industry.

“Cloud Service Providers, Telecoms and Enterprises utilize high-density storage for the mountains of unstructured data they must manage, driven by an increasing proliferation of connected endpoint devices and sensors. Seagate’s new 12TB hard drive is an ideal component for our OCP-based solutions, and the integration of these innovative new drives will offer our customers the reliable and efficient storage they need,” said Mike Yang, Senior Vice-President & General Manager of Quanta Computer Inc. and President of Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT).

Seagate’s engineers have worked closely with the world’s largest cloud providers and OEMs to gain a deeper understanding of the data management challenges they face. This insight led our engineering team to implement several new firmware and hardware innovations to the helium-filled hard drives, resulting in the following key improvements:

· Highly scalable hard drive storage that is rapidly deployable for maximum performance and energy efficiency for Open Compute Project (OCP) platforms.

· 50-per cent higher capacity, which enables hyper-scale customers to deploy over 10PB of high-performance storage in a single 42U rack for the first time – maintaining current space, weight, and power consumption profiles.

· 21-per cent increase in IOPs performance/watt perfect for next-generation eco-friendly infrastructures.

· 20-per cent increase in enhanced caching performance, which results in faster access to unstructured data.

These innovations enable customers to gain more control over unstructured data, store vastly more information and retrieve it more quickly than ever before without expanding the storage footprint in the data center. By offering the lowest power consumption and lowest weight in the industry, the drop-in upgrade 12TB drive translates to a groundbreaking TCO for hyper-scale customers.

“Data storage innovations have led to dramatically improved business results. For example, Cloud companies are storing massive amounts of videos and images in hyper-scale infrastructures for search and social applications. Our 12TB drive helps solve the proliferation of data both enterprise and cloud service customers must manage and move, while improving response times,” said John Morris, vice president of products at Seagate.

The 12TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD – along with several demonstrations of Seagate SSD products that meet Open Compute Project specifications – were showcased at the OCP Summit 2017.