Seagate is making news with a new hard drive it bills as the world's fastest. But it could be the drive's other benefits -- its low power consumption and small form factor -- that make it attractive to data centers that are increasingly taxed with eye-popping energy bills and space-crushing building constraints.
First, the basics. Seagate's drive, the Savvio 15K, is a serial attached SCSI unit that spins at an athletic 15,000 RPM, the world's first 2.5-inch drive to do so. Its speed makes it a good fit for demanding enterprise  applications, such as customer -relationship management (CRM ) and enterprise-resource planning (ERP) systems that have hundreds or even thousands of users.
But its second benefit, its size, is no less important. According to John Rydning, IDC's research manager for disk drives, data centers are seeking to scale down the size of their equipment -- or merely components of their equipment, such as hard drives -- while increasing capacity.
"It's all about performance," said Rydning. "What the 2.5-inch drive enables, for example, is that you can put a full RAID 5 in a 1U." In the end, that lets data centers do more with less.
All This and Speed, Too
Storing more in a smaller space could make make all the difference to data centers that need to expand but don't always have the room to do so. Why? Because companies are rapidly increasing their need for information (and the storage to house it), but rarely expand the size of their headquarters in concert, forcing data center designers and I.T. managers to pack more and more equipment into the same-sized space.
And with higher densities comes more heat. Seagate claims the Savvio 15K, which comes in 36- and 73-GB models, needs 30 percent less power than any other 15K drive. That's good news to data centers coping with the high cost of cooling bills, as ultradense architectures, including blade servers that pack high-powered machines into racks like sardines, prove harder and harder to cool.
All that heat does more than break the bank; it breaks equipment, too, causing failures of all kinds and even hard-to-explain data defects. It also gives rise to new breeds of cooling equipment that employ novel strategies, from liquid-chilled racks to cabinets that spray liquid coolant directly on servers themselves.
Technical Leaps
As for uptime, Seagate claims that its new drive has one of the industry's best measurements with a 1.6 million MTBF, or mean time between failures.
According to IDC's Rydning, Seagate's drive is an important step in a storage field that's growing quickly.
"It's a real challenge to get the head to fly stably over a disk surface as it is, when you're spinning a disk at 15,000 RPM to keep those heads following and tracking properly," he said. "With the small space they're doing that, there's a lot of windage management that needs to take place inside the drive."
Seagate has received at least one other industry nod of approval. HP has begun to include the Savvio 15K in its line of ProLiant servers.
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