Another Industry First

By Mike Workman, Pillar Data Systems

Recently we announced support for 2 TB disks in our Axiom array. Thanks to technologists in the hard disk industry, we have witnessed an amazing progression of bit density improvement for the last 54 years. In fact, during the last five decades, the hard disk drive guys have grown areal density faster than the semiconductor industry. And since I spent 20 years in the HDD biz, I am especially proud of them. I also think Pillar does a great job of recognizing that the HDD professionals at Hitachi, WD, and Seagate to name a few, are the prime movers of the storage industry. (Their suppliers, of course, in turn play a key role in their success).

With 2TB drives we can expect the inevitable characterizations like: "Each drive can store enough documents to stack to the moon." I always hated these, but the PR folks say this is how you relate to "Mom and Pop." I always asked, "How many disk drives do Mom and Pop buy?" Believe it or not, they had an answer for that too "Well, they may not buy drives, but they buy stock, and this reinforces us as a technology leader." Point taken. I am sure the guys at WD that produce our 2 TB 5400 RPM drives are proud of their product and leadership position over rivals. But I always think of our customers first … and I'm pretty sure they don't care how many Ford F350 pick-up trucks it would take to haul their documents to a recycling center or some other goofball metaphor.

Some of you will recall that Pillar was the first in the storage array business to ship 1TB drives from Hitachi. Today we are the first to ship 2TB drives, this time from WD. I should note that our good friends at Xyratex qualified the WD drive a few weeks ago, but I think their customers are mostly OEMs like Pillar. Meanwhile, we are shipping drives to end users of the arrays, and I believe this is before anyone else.

What do Pillar customers care about? Well, stuff like reducing power consumption by 50% per TB, reducing rack space (for those with co-location facilities that rent by the rack), and/or replacing less reliable MAID crap with reliable on-line arrays that hold 350+ TB per rack without losing 20 TB here and there. Sorry to slam, but for crying out loud we need standards here. Just because something is slower and less expensive, it doesn't mean it can be crap. After all, if you don't care about losing it, why not put it on tape? (He shoots, he scores!)

Of course the performance of these drives is not quite that we see in our SSD and FC drives, but hey, they sport the best $/TB in the industry, along with the best Watts/TB and TB/M3 (online)… so they fill a need.

Using Pillar's QoS archive band, these babies are pretty effective at storing large amounts of information online (as opposed to nearly on-line) for applications that need it. Nothing says that the same system can't include FC disk, or 7200 RPM 1TB disks, or whatever else you need to meet the requirements of your applications and the service level expectations of end users.

Here's a better metaphor than dump trucks and trips to the moon: if we moved 50,000 PB stored on 1TB disk to half the number of 2TB spindles, we could save the world more than $100M a year in energy costs. In fact, we could turn back several of the largest VLCC class supertankers. What does this mean to Mom and Pop? It means that if someone were to convert all this to apple pies, they could keep their son in pie for his whole life, even discounting that eating pie at this rate, the family will be forced into a much larger house.

All kidding aside, we have added a great tool to the arsenal of our customers and prospects in the fight for better TCO, reduced waste, and budget control.