14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate technology has just announced its new Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive that will begin shipping later this month. Built from ground up for high-performance computing and enterprise storage environments, the Cheetah family is a top-tier offering in Seagate's storage family of products.
The new drives are built with the second generation of perpendicular recording technology and will hit the market in capacities of 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB. However, the Cheetah family offers more than storage: its most important feature is performance, and the units are rated at 1.6 million hours of continuous working (MTBF ? mean time before failure).
Cheetahs are Seagate's highest-performance offerings in the 3.5-inch form factor, and enjoy a 28 percent increase in sustained data transfer rates (164 MB/s), while using up to 61 percent less power than the previous generations of server-class storage devices. The power-savings achievements are possible thanks to the built-in Seagate PowerTrim technology, that dynamically optimizes the unit's power consumption, whether in Idle or Active mode.
Top-tier OEM system builders are currently implementing the new offering from Seagate into their SAN storage systems. One of the most active adopters is HP in their Storage-Attached Network devices for enterprise and corporate businesses.
"HP's Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), incorporating Seagate's latest Cheetah 15K.6 drive, will fulfill the needs of our most demanding customers running mission-critical business applications," said Kyle Fitze, director, StorageWorks SAN Marketing, at HP. "The improvements in performance, reliability, power savings, and capacity will collectively help enable our own EVA systems to deliver greater overall value to our customers."
The Cheetah 15K.6 drive comes in the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) version, a reference point for medium and large companies, such as Super Micro Computer, Inc, which expects to offer the drive in its SuperServers.
"Many of our customers require top-of- the-line performance and system efficiency," said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. "Integrating Seagate's Cheetah 15K.6 drive into our 85%+ high-efficiency, earth-friendly SuperServers(TM) and Server Building Block Solutions(R) delivers not only superior performance, but also power savings, scalability and significantly reduced TCO."
According to Matt Bryson, storage analyst for Avian Securities, Seagate's new offering will have "some significant industry ramifications," since its Arch-rival on the storage market, Fujitsu, has currently no matching offer. However, the latter will take some time to make the jump to a 600 GB drive directly, before making any addition to its enterprise-class storage offering.
"In our view Seagate's early roll-out of the new enterprise class product and Fujitsu's seeming decision not to play at this capacity point will at least solidify Seagate's market leading share position with the potential for Seagate to even see some share gains," Bryson said.
Softpedia is present at this year's CeBIT Expo and Show, so stay tuned for further information regarding Seagate's enterprise-level storage solutions.