Seagate drive in orbit, why not?

Seagate has begun shipping what it says is the world’s first 1TB SAS hard drives, as well as the first self-encrypting enterprise-oriented hard drives.

The 3.5-inch Barracuda ES.2 HDD series now comes in a serial-attached SCSI interface and 1TB capacity. Seagate estimates the speedier SAS data transfer rate offers an average 135 per cent performance boost over the SATA interface. The 1TB SATA version of Barracuda began shipping last year.

Today’s “official” introduction of 1TB SAS hard drives should offer a tempting combination of capacity and performance for high-end storage operators armed with an enlarged coin purse. Seagate is pitching the whole ordeal as a value from a cost-per-GB basis.

The Barracuda ES.2 series of SAS drives spin at 7200 rpm, and advertise a 1.2 million hours mean time between failure. The drive uses a 16MB cache and has an average latency of 4.16ms. Average random seek time is 8.5ms and random write speed is 9.5ms. Models are also available in 500GB and 750GB capacity with both SAS and SATA interfaces.

Seagate doesn’t list a price for the 1TB whopper, although our internet window shopping suggests around $350 per drive. That’s about a $50 premium over the similar SATA model.

Seagate has also announced a new version of its Cheetah HDD lineup for data centers that features automatic encryption technology baked into the drive’s controller.

The 3.5-inch Cheetah 15k.6 FDE (Full Disk Encryption) comes in 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB flavors with both SAS and Fibre Channel interfaces.

Earlier this year, the company began putting automatic data encryption into laptop drives. Seagate has stated it expects the technology to become standard for all hard drives.

The drives will ship to OEM suppliers this quarter. They should start popping up in vendor arrays later this year. ®

Official Register Link

Folks may be tightening their wallets under gray economical times, but the need to keep close tabs on our fellow man is in as great of demand as ever.

That’s why EMC rolling out a handful of new services to assist customers in linking storage systems to the video surveillance units, card readers, alarms, intrusion detection systems, and so on that keep humanity from reverting to a pack of wild, rampaging animals.

The storage vendor is teaming up with video security specialist and domestic spying technology supplier, Verint Systems to implement the services, which are available now. EMC will target customers in retail, financial services, gaming, transportation, air travel, correctional facilities, education, border control — you name it — who have heaps of digital surveillance devices that are disconnected from each another, and no storage plan to sift through the data.

EMC’s new security service assessment is a three-parter:

1) Assessment for Physical Security: where EMC and Verint, (as well as partners such as Unisys, British Telecom, Orion Systems Group and others) identify a customer’s security requirements.

2) Design for Physical Security: uses the information collected in the assessment plan to design a customer’s physical security environment to include any available connectivity between items such as cameras, alarms, video archiving, encoders, video software and network services.

3) Implementation for Physical Security: is all about selling a bundle that includes Verint IP video software and EMC Clariion-based storage. EMC says it will also install everything, including cameras and other physical security devices.

Official Register Link

There’s nothing wrong in theory with a vendor that caters to large corporations having a crack at the consumer market.

Yet perhaps in being so dependent on the colossal proportions of Brobdingnag, one loses a true sense of scale for the outside world. Ditching metaphors: data centers are willing to spend a lot on hardware. Your average household, not so much.

So here’s EMC’s first product designed, tested, manufactured and sold in a single country outside of the US. It’s the 4TB network storage box, the StorageCredenza, today being introduced for Chinese — and at the moment only Chinese —consumers.

EMC says a household can get their hands on the basic model with one terabyte capacity (4x 250GB SATA drives) for only 8,980 yuan.

Official Link