Seagate Expands EVault Cloud, Other Storage Solutions

Storage vendor Seagate Technology this week expanded its storage solution and cloud storage capabilities with new clustered systems, hard drives, flash acceleration cards and EVault cloud appliances.

The new solutions come in response to a move by the storage industry to more and more "disaggregate" the software from the hardware in much the same way virtualization broke the tie between compute and the underlying hardware, said David Flesh, vice president of marketing for Seagate's Cloud Systems and Solutions Group.

"Traditionally, storage software has been tightly coupled to the hardware, but this is changing," Flesh told CRN. "Customers are now looking at how software will help them remain competitive."

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The Cloud Systems and Solutions Group, which was quietly formed earlier this year to help Seagate better manage its cloud storage business, is taking the experience it has learned from working with cloud services providers with new approaches to storage including software-defined storage and open storage and applying them to its latest solutions, Flesh said.

This week saw Seagate expand its EVault cloud storage solution, which features an appliance that sits on a customer's or a solution provider's site to provide fast, local backups and restores and which is tied to the EVault cloud for disaster recovery.

The latest version of the Seagate EVault Enterprise Backup and Recovery Appliance now features twice the on-premise capacity, or 100 TBs, of its predecessor, Flesh said.

Seagate EVault Enterprise Backup and Recovery Appliances range from 38 TB to 100 TB of usable capacity and can be combined for up to 1 PB in a full-size rack to provide incremental, block-level backups and granular restore capabilities in multi-tenant environments, he said.

Getting that higher capacity is important to customers trying to manage increasingly larger data stores, said Anthony Kessel, director of product management at SunGard Availability Services, a Wayne, Penn.-based provider of managed IT and disaster recovery services.

SunGard AS, as it is commonly known, partners with the Seagate EVault cloud to provide backup and recovery services to customers, Kessel told CRN.

The new, larger EVault appliances, with their new capacity point and higher processing speeds compared to existing models, will help consolidate customers' backup streams and better handle larger capacities of data, Kessel said.

"We are looking forward to deploying the larger appliances," he said. "Customers are asking for them for larger data sets. In the past, we either deployed multiple appliances, or used other hardware."

NEXT: Scale-Out Storage, Security And More

Seagate also launched its Seagate ClusterStor 9000 solution which integrates open source Lustre-based, scale-out software for use in big data and high performance computing solutions, Flesh said. The Seagate ClusterStor 9000 provides a 50 percent increase in performance over the earlier models and now features a grid array with 400 percent faster RAID rebuild speeds, he said.

The Seagate ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance, a version of the ClusterStor series with security capabilities such as audit logging and tracking, encryption and support for enforcing ’least privilege’ access control, is now certified for the U.S. government's Intelligence Community Directive 503.

"This means it can protect against internal threats such as someone trying to take data from the system," Flesh said. "Think of the Snowden revelations. This technology could have prevented the breach."

The Intelligence Community Directive 503 is for now being targeted primarily at government users, Flesh said. "But when we look at similar threats in commercial environments, we see other opportunities moving forward."

Also new from Seagate is an expansion of its PCIE flash accelerator cards, including the new half-height Nytro XP6302 for high-density rack deployments and the new high-capacity XP6209 with up to 1.86 TBs of capacity, or double the previous model.

Seagate also introduced new enterprise-class hard drives, including a low-cost 2-TB, 2.5-inch nearline drive; new 15,000-rpm drives with double the capacity and increased performance over previous models; and new 10,000-rpm drives targeting mission-critical storage requirements.

The new drives feature 12-Gbit-per-second SAS connectivity, automated encryption, a secure erase function to delete data when drives are retired and fast RAID rebuilds, Flesh said.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 12, 2014