HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, now a Western Digital company) announces it will show off its 12-Gbits-per-second SAS SSD technology at the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase on May 9 2012. 

The demo uses 12Gbps SAS host bus adaptors (HBAs) and expanders from LSI and PMC-Sierra. 

The company says an SSD with two 12Gbps SAS interface can read and write data at 12Gbps second speed, with total bandwidth of 4.8GB per second. 

Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) is the most popular protocol for enterprise high-speed storage, and currently Read more...

According to IDC Q4 2011 enterprise-grade external disk storage system (EDSS) revenues in W. Europe are up by just 2% Y-o-Y, reaching $1.51bn, indicating stress on the market. 

It was also the first quarter in W. Europe where vendors shipped over 1 exabyte (1 million terabytes) of new capacity in total-- 11% Y-o-Y growth in capacity. 

Meanwhile Q4 2011 prices are up by 10% Q-o-Q due to shortages throughout the HDD supply line. 

Seasonally Q4 shows healthy high-end sales (37% Q-o-Q growth), even if overall activity was flat on a Y-o-Y basis. Offsetting strong year-end moment in Germany, Switzerland and Belgium is weakness in other markets, including the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.  Read more...

Disk is dead.

That's the way the world looks when you've making The World's First All Flash-Based Array.

There's no pity for the death of disk in the voice of Brian Feller, VP Sales & Marketing for Whiptail. Interviewed in their new London office, Feller talks about the rise of 100% solid state storage arrays and storage problems in data centres today. 

You can add park more and more servers in the server parks but you can't drive the full value of virtualization. Not without accelerated performance

Whiptail commercialized the first NAND Flash Silicon Storage Array (SSA). Whiptail's SSAs enable databases, virtualized and online environments to process more data in significantly less time. The end user sees data processing time shrink from days to hours or hours to minutes. And while application performance improves, you still consume less energy than legacy storage arrays. 

Let's put it this way: it's like buying a much faster car, one that responds well to the lightest touch, and yet it uses less gas than the clunker you were driving. Read more...

Hitachi GST launches what it claims is the first 4TB enterprise-class HDD family-- the Ultrastar 7K4000, a transitional 3.5-inch series bridging between native 512 3TB and native 4TB products. 

Using 512 byte emulation (512e), it has sectors laid out in 4K chunks to boost efficiency and capacity while still appearing as 512 byte at system level.  

The company says the 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 delivers 33% more capacity within a 3.5-inch footprint, with 24% lower watts/GB over the previous 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 HDD. 

It carries a 6Gb/s SATA interface, together Read more...