Seagate's BUMPER State of the Storage Nation announcement

EVault

Seagate has recently bought its semi-separate EVault unit back in-house and now it is included in the CES business unit. There have been a number of EVault backup appliances, including a Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliance in March 2013, with up to 24TB of usable capacity and support of the EVault cloud as a backup target as an alternative to replicating to a second appliance or public cloud.

EVault Backup and Recovery Appliance

Now it has launched 3U and 4U Enterprise Backup and Recovery Appliances (EBA) for business and managed service provider use. EVault EBAs can support up to 50 TB (3U product) and 100TB (4U product) of usable capacity; “perfect for heterogeneous environments demanding up to a full petabyte of data storage and extreme computing power.”

They “include an unlimited number of agents, satellite software licenses and application plug-ins.” These agents “protect virtually all platforms and applications, including Microsoft Windows, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, and Cluster Services; Unix platforms; Linux, Solaris, IBM AIX, and IBM iSeries; hypervisors including VMware and Hyper-V; and Oracle databases.”

Interestingly the appliances use 3TB or 4TB drives spinning at 7,200rpm and configured for RAID 6. This is not high-density, not when Seagate has 6TB drives available which, at first glance, could increase usable capacity to 150TB.

Let's redefine the EBA product. It's a server plus storage running data protection software to backup up production data and replicate it to a second device or the cloud, acting as a data protection cloud storage gateway. Although it does incremental, changed block-only, backups and has compression, it does not have deduplication. Surely Seagate must be looking to add deduplication; Permabit would be very keen to help.

What else could be added? Virtual machine-aware backup and recovery; this is an obvious extension isn't it? Why not better protect VMware, Microsoft and KVM virtual machines?

Check out an EVault EBA data sheet here (pdf).

External Storage

The LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 product has a bevelled edge aluminium box containing a single Seagate 6TB 7.200rpm drive with transfer speeds of up to 220MB/sec though dual Thunderbolt 2 ports. Up to six devices can be daisy-chained together and USB 3.0 is also supported.

There will be USB 3.0-only versions with 3, 4 and 5TB capacities.

LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 in its awkward aluminium box

Look at the picture and see how the LaCie d2 drive absolutely does not match the Mac Pro’s darkly shining cylindrical design; pity, that.

Compare it with HGST’s G-Technology G-SPEED Studio, another Thunderbolt 2 external drive with up to 24TB of capacity from four 6TB Helium drives. It’s obvious, I’m afraid, that LaCie has just lost out in the Mac Pro external storage design stakes.

Quad-drive G-SPEED Studio in glossy black curved Mac Pro-pleasing form

Seagate says “ LaCie [Neil Poulton] designed the d2 Thunderbolt 2 to be upgradable to the fastest SSD on the market, which boosts speeds up to 1150 MB/s.”

The d2 SSD upgrade is a 128GB PCIe flash card, which is sold separately and installed through the d2’s rear panel. It accompanies the disk drive and Seagate says;”Use the SSD for bandwidth-intensive tasks, such as fast file transfers, audio mixing, video editing, or OS booting, and the hard disk for file archiving.”

It seems a unique combo and, for speed freaks, is good news but please, fix the design look.

Check out a LacIe d2 video here.

PS: HGST has announced the G-SPEED Studio XL with up to 8 x 7,200rpm disk drives, and up to 64TB capacity, using 8TB drives. Bandwidth is up to 1,350MB/sec and users can configure RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 60.