Meeting storage needs across the board

Enterprise-level applications are the backbone of storage for the world's data. The challenge for businesses is to reliably store, manage and protect vast amounts of information.

There is a broad range of products for fast-growing enterprise applications, one of which is Seagate Technology's hard drives that are widely used as storage systems to help businesses reduce costs and improve efficiency.

There has been no let-up in the drive towards more compact storage, and the top firms continue to compete for a lucrative market.

Seagate's Barracuda ES, Savvio and Cheetah hard drives are its top range for server and enterprise storage that meet the needs of the IT environment across small, medium-sized and large enterprises.

'In today's space-constrained, power hungry data centres, clients are constantly battling with how to pack in more computing power without blowing the energy budget,' said Andrew Yang, country manager for Seagate China.

The external hard drive is a fast-growing industry, especially in digital consumer electronics. Seagate's competitors, Samsung and Hitachi, are working to develop similar small form factor, high-density hard drives to power the on-demand world.

Leading suppliers Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun are boosting the efficiency of their systems with storage powered by Savvio drives.

'HP has standardised its server product line to this 2?-inch form factor across the majority of its new ProLiant, Integrity and BladeSystem offerings with compatibility in Storageworks MSA external storage,' Mr Yang said.

'IBM offers the 2?-inch drive in all of its BladeCenter servers and includes Savvio drives in the majority of its newest System X servers. Sun has adopted 2?-inch enterprise class drives across its entire server portfolio, from entry level to data centre to blade server product lines,' he said.

Seagate's Lyrion hard drive was the industry's first single-platter, 60GB, 1.8-inch hard drive, enabled by perpendicular recording technology, and is only 5mm thick.

For its 2?-inch hard drive series, Seagate developed the world's first 7,200rpm notebook PC hard drive to combine capacity-boosting perpendicular recording technology with free-fall protection for improved laptop durability.

Samsung has also announced development of a 7,200rpm premium 2?-inch hard drive series - SpinPoint MP1 - providing the industry's highest storage density of 200GB at 7,200rpm on a 2?-inch disk base with Sata interface (serial ATA is a serial version of the ATA type of interface).