Seagate is getting serious about cloud storage.
The company this week announced a new cloud-centric product strategy, centered on its new business unit appropriately called Cloud Systems and Solutions, whose goal is to help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and other organizations craft storage systems that can handle big workloads. Based on the company's acquisition of Xyratex, a hard disk drive (HDD) test equipment maker, and EVault, a backup-and-recovery specialist, Seagate aims to further expand beyond its traditional role as a hard drive manufacturer to a provider of "Intelligent Information Infrastructure."
"Organizations are looking for cost-effective ways to harness data and create actionable information," said Jamie Lerner, head of the Seagate Cloud Systems and Solutions division, in a statement. "We are applying our experience working with cloud service providers worldwide to create systems and solutions that manage next generation workloads with the scale, performance and economy aligned to business needs."
Lerner, who joined Seagate in February, is the former senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group. Prior to that, he served as CEO of CITTIO, maker of the WatchTower systems monitoring and management tool.
Now, he is tasked with overseeing a cloud-enabled portfolio comprised of four major product groups. This includes a new line of ClusterStor, the company's Lustre-based storage systems for high performance computing (HPC) and big data environments, and a range of engineered Intelligent Information Infrastructure solutions for do-it-yourself (DIY) organizations. Also on tap are modularized systems for OEMs, and finally, cloud-based backup, archiving recovery.
As part of the effort, Seagate unveiled the ClusterStor 9000. Leveraging the Lustre file system, the storage system can scale to 3.4 PB and deliver up to 63 GB per second in bandwidth performance in a single rack. According to company estimates, the 9000 is 50 percent faster than its predecessors and achieves 400 percent faster rebuild times, courtesy of GridRAID technology.
The company also launched new EVault Enterprise Backup and Recovery Appliances (EVault EBA) for enterprises cloud backup services providers. "Our partners and customers have been asking for appliances that can accommodate up to 100TB in usable capacity in a single machine and we have delivered," said Unmesh Kulkarni, senior director of product management, for Seagate Cloud Systems and Solutions, in a statement.
In other Seagate storage news, the company launched two new PCIe flash cards, the Nytro XP6302 and XP6209, the latter of which is available in a 1.86 TB stock keeping unit (SKU). The low-profile Nytro XP6302, available in capacities of up to 1.75 GB, features eMLC flash and bandwidth of up to 3.5 GB per second compared to the 1.5 GB per second limit of competing PCIe SSDs, claimed the company.