Summary
Seagate Technology introduced its newest line of Cheetah enterprise HDDs with storage capacities up to 600 GB, the highest ever for such drives The drives are available with 6 Gbps SAS or 4 Gbps Fibre Channel high speed storage interfaces These are the first enterprise drives to include built-in drive encryption allowing protection of drive data as well as a fast sanitization by erasing the encryption key.
Analysis
Seagate Technology has announced a new line of Cheetah enterprise HDDs with storage capacities up to 600 GB (the higher ever for these products) as well as rotational rates of 10k and 15k RPM. These products use either 6 Gbps SAS or 4 Gbps Fibre Channel storage interfaces supporting a rich library of storage commands and the fastest storage interface data rates.
These are also the first enterprise drives generally available offering built-in hardware-based encryption. This allows data on a server to be kept secure even in the event of theft or unauthorized access attempts. In addition, built-in encryption allows rapid sanitization of the disk drive content by erasing the encryption key on the drive. This can be done in milliseconds and once the key is erased all that is left on the disk drive is undecipherable cryptext.
With high performance SSDs starting to gain momentum in the enterprise storage market HDD companies have needed to respond with a new generation of product. HDDs offer better storage capacity for the price than SSDs and by offering up to 600 GB in these new Cheetah drives Seagate is making it a bit easier to defend this very lucrative market from the growing available of higher performing SSDs.
Still we expect that SSDs will continue to gain momentum in this market where for many applications data rates are the most valuable characteristic of a storage device. Seagate is still expected to announce an enterprise SSD product of its own before the year is out and it will be interesting to see what they do and how they continue to differentiate their enterprise SSDs from their enterprise HDDs.
Thomas Coughlin consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
