Good Things Come In Small Packages

So sometime next year, Seagate Technology plans to develop and make public a disk drive with a 2.5-inch form factor -- a device about the size of a deck of cards. Most notebook computers already contain disk drives that size, but Seagate's intention is to design one for enterprise-class servers.

In this era of server consolidation, Seagate clearly wants to capitalize on the need to reduce the number of servers customers have to manage and cut down on the amount of space their systems are taking up.

"Six years ago, people were selling these huge, honking servers," says Brian Kraus, a senior marketing manager at Seagate. "There used to be 5U or 6U (1U equals 1.75 inches) servers. Now they are selling servers that are 2Us or 3Us in size. Over time, things get smaller."

At a time when servers are getting smaller -- already, many of the major vendors have a blade-server road map -- the demands on server performance have gone up. There are more users, putting more stress on application performance. Companies are under the gun to keep applications running endlessly, with no interruption. Seagate executives say this new, small disk drive, which will run at 10,000 RPMs, will create at least a 33 percent savings in space while performing up to 140 percent faster on a per-U basis compared with systems loaded with 15,000 RPM drives. Seagate executives contend that a smaller form factor allows for more space within a system, so IT managers can load up a system with more drives, thus getting better performance.

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Kraus declined to give more speeds and feeds on this disk drive because the specifications are still being worked on. But he promised the device will enable IT managers to put at least six drives into a 1U server. A 1U server ordinarily contains two drives. That's only enough to handle redundancy for the operating system. A 1U server holding six drives means two drives can handle the OS and the other four can be used for RAID 5 -- a form of enterprise-data protection that requires a minimum of three drives.

"This new disk drive is about high performance in a smaller size," Kraus says. "This is what marketing is telling us: Size matters."

But by no means is Seagate giving up on producing 15,000-RPM drives. Executives believe these devices also have their place in the market. The firm recently announced the Cheetah 15K.3, which is expected to run at 35 percent more I/Os per second than the Cheetah 10K.6. How does this benefit the end user? Again, the answer is better performance. You get the same capacity and performance with fewer drives, which cuts down on hardware and management costs; fewer drives means fewer points of failure. Although the 15,000-RPM drive -- Seagate's third generation -- costs more at the outset, it will produce better price/performance over time.

The Cheetah 15K.3 will be put into workstations, midrange to high-end servers, and network-attached storage and storage-attached networks. Because the Cheetah 15K.3 spins at more revolutions per minute than the 10,000 RPM drive, more clients will be able to access to data in both read-and-write mode, says Gianna DaGiau, Seagate's global product marketing manager for its enterprise storage group. Thus, the disk drive is less likely to be the point of the bottleneck. In addition, a faster drive enables use of these systems for a longer period of time.

Seagate executives say you end up using 20 percent fewer drives and 20 percent fewer racks with a 15,000 RPM disk drive. "Frankly, if you have fewer drives in a system, you have higher reliability," DaGiau says.

Vendors are beating the drum of their message for cost savings. Customers are demanding it. Technology and marketing are responding.