Cold data "hot" up

A survey of data center policymakers in China by HGST, a subsidiary of the Western Data group, has found that 98% of respondents believe that if data can be stored effectively, all data is valuable. All the work done by Enterprise Informatization, the transformation of enterprise to cloud computing, the application of big data, etc., is nothing more than to make better use of data and derive value from it. James Ho, vice President of HGST Asia Pacific, said with great certainty that the data is a very unique and valuable asset.

The online data, commonly known as thermal data, which is closely related to the production of enterprises, has always been the focus of data storage. In order to better deal with and save the thermal data, people think of a lot of ways, the relevant technical innovation in endless. Recently, the most popular flash technology has greatly improved the access performance of thermal data. HGST, which has been adhering to the new technology of mechanical hard drives, is also continuing to focus on the progress of Flash technologies and the introduction of the next generation of products.

For example, this September HGST introduced the new NVME compliant Ultrastar SN100 PCIe SSD. The product line integrates Toshiba's MLC NAND flash memory with a simplified PCIe SSD system, with HGST consistently high quality and high reliability. The Ultrastar SN100 SSD, primarily for database acceleration, virtualization, and big data analysis, uses a half-height, half-length card format, based on standard 2.5-inch hard drive specifications and capacity up to 3.2TB. To enhance the durability and reliability of NAND flash memory, the Ultrastar SN100 SSD family uses HGST cellcare NAND management technology optimized for Toshiba MLC NAND Flash.

While the enthusiasm for hot data is not reduced, the data itself has an inherent life cycle that is bound to go through the process from hot to cold, from online to offline until it is deleted. As the amount of data increases and time goes by, the large amount of data in the enterprise is gradually changed from online storage to long-term retention and archiving, that is, into the "cold treatment" link. In fact, as users of data accessibility requirements gradually improved, in some industries there is no complete sense of cold data, because even the archived data, may be in some special circumstances require to be quickly accessed, such as phone bill query.

The so-called "cold data" is a large number of data that needs to be kept or archived in a long, secure way. These cold data can be accessed much less frequently than online thermal data, but this data is not useless data, but is always ready to be queried.

HGST believes that the "cold data" market will soon heat up as the volume of data grows rapidly. To this end, HGST intends to enter the data archiving market related to cold data. As a traditional hard disk manufacturer, HGST's original technical expertise is to manufacture storage components, and to enter the data archiving market, the development of a complete archiving system for HSGT is also a new challenge.

James Ho says HGST is targeting the emerging blue-ocean storage market – dynamic archiving. While deep archiving remains a "write-once" operation that wants to "never read", high-growth applications and data are creating new, long-term data storage patterns. In addition to scalability, dynamic filing systems require low cost and high efficiency. In the past, tapes provided a low-cost, high-capacity way to archive data, but did not allow users to quickly access random data. Today's mainstream disk storage is able to meet user requirements for data access performance, but cannot meet the low-cost requirements of petabytes of storage environments.

HGST is trying to create dynamic archiving platforms that meet cost, performance, efficiency, and reliability requirements through innovative technologies. HGST's dynamic archiving platform is designed to achieve 10 times times the storage density and power efficiency of traditional enterprise data center solutions, and 5 times times the storage density and power efficiency of commonly used scalable cloud computing data center solutions.

James Ho said the objective of HGST's dynamic archiving platform was to achieve more than 10PB of capacity in a single data center rack. With HGST-based solutions, users can configure dynamic archiving platforms for different storage architectures, including scalable object storage solutions for public and private cloud datacenters.

HGST has begun delivering samples of the dynamic archiving platform to its strategic partners, and will be commercially available in early 2015.

This article is from the "Guo Tao Storage World" blog, so be sure to keep this source http://gtstorageworld.blog.51cto.com/908359/1585113

Cold data "hot" up