We have talked many times on this blog about Perpendicular Magnetic Recording and the huge areal density possibilities that the technology opens up in disk. I also recall posting here or somewhere the chat I had with a fellow in Colorado who was designing sealed disk arrays featuring laptop drives that could be tossed when you lose X number of drives (same logic that sees us dumping the hard disk in our PC when too many sectors go bad).
Now marry the two concepts together and you have a pretty good small footprint/huge capacity array story to tell. Enterprise-class? Heck, I don’t know what that means anymore. I have been using a PMR disk in my laptop for about a year and it has caused me no pain. That, plus the lower cost of the drives I’ve seen from Fujitsu and Seagate, makes me think that Mike Linett is right on the money in his recent post on the subject — especially when such arrays are used for storing rarely accessed archival data.
Something to think about.
Also, I was informed in the last day or two that the NetGear SC101T will ship shortly. It supports SATA drives rather than PATA (drives used in last year’s little toaster). Perhaps the smart people at Bell or NetGear will think about using PMR drives for really big capacities.
Zetera technology is inside the NetGear Storage Central and the Bell Micro Hammer Z. Today, the company announced another source of supply for arrays based on their technology, this time in Germany. Says the release that came over the wire today…
transtec AG, well known in the European market for delivering custom-tailored IT and storage solutions that don’t sacrifice on customer value and quality, will be offering a new family of network storage solutions based on Zetera’s Z-SAN Storage-over-IP technology. The new storage solutions will address the needs of the SMB sector, and marks Zetera’s entry into the European market.
Go get ‘em, Brave Little Toaster.
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