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August 17, 2015

Spectra Taps ‘Shingled’ Drives to Store Big Archives

Spectra Logic today unveiled a new NAS archive appliance built with spinning disks featuring Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology. The increased storage density enabled by SMR lets the new Spectra Verde DPE (Digital Preservation Enterprise) appliance store petabytes worth of unstructured data at very low cost.

Spectra is one of a number of storage device manufacturers (including Seagate) using SMR technologies to help it overcome storage density limits of existing disk drives. The heads of traditional disk drives use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), which write the data to the disk platter in a series of individual sectors that are separated by a gap.

With SMR, instead of leaving a gap between each sector, the drive’s head overlaps several sectors on top of each other. No data is lost, because the sectors are “trimmed” with each successive pass. But the end result is that the drives can write upwards of 20 to 25 percent more data onto the platter.

SMR_white paper

SMR splits the gaps between sectors on disks, according to this graphic from “SMR – This Is Not Your Father’s Disk Drive.”

The tradeoff of SMR is that the data on the sectors cannot be independently updated anymore, according to an informative paper on SMR by FreeBSD Foundation founder Justin Gibbs entitled “SMR – This Is Not Your Father’s Disk Drive.” As a result, the firmware managing the drives must be intelligent enough to handle SMR, which is where Spectra Logic and its new Verde DPE appliance come in.

Considering that the SMR approach is similar to the sequential writes of tape drives, one shouldn’t be too surprised that Spectra Logic–a supplier of tape drives for big data environments– adopted SMR. “It took a tape company to leverage the SMR technology to its fullest by using sequential data writes to increase performance, similar to writing to tape,” the company says on its website.

The new Verde DPE combines SMR disk drives into a network attached storage (NAS) appliance geared towards long-term archive of unstructured data. Spectra Logic has bundled a single 4U master node (up to 200TB of storage) with up to nine 4U expansion nodes (containing up to 96 drives delivering 800TB of storage each) into a single rack, delivering a whopping 7.4 PB of raw Ethernet-connected storage capacity in the process.

Access to the appliance is by way of Spectra’s implementation of the ZFS file system, or via the CIFS or NFS interfaces. Customers can also connect Verde DPEs to Spectra’s BlackPearl appliances, which serve as a front-end to Spectra’s massive T-Series LTO-based tape libraries.

On the data protection front, the appliance include triple-parity RAID Z3 data striping, continuous data checksum routines, built-in hot spare drives, “intelligent” rebuild capacities, and built-in data synchronization. When properly monitored and maintained, the odds of losing data are 1 in over 2 million years, the company says.

Verde DPE_2Spectra says the Verde DPE can deliver storage at a cost of $.09 per GB. That’s still considerably higher than tape, which averages about $.01 per GB, according to a recent Overland Storage blog post. But it’s considerably less than the typical $.45 to $.90 per GB customers might pay with a typical NAS appliance.

“For pennies per GB, Verde DPE is built for bulk storage and archive of large, unstructured files,” said Spectra Logic Chief Technology Officer Matt Starr. Combined with Spectra’s tape products, the Verde DPE is an example of “genetic diversity” in digital asset protection, Starr says. “We think of our newest product as the next step in the evolution of digital preservation.”

Spectra Logic CEO Nathan C. Thompson says the new appliance will give customers the utmost confidence in the safety of their data. “Verde DPE combines our 35 years of deep storage expertise with the latest in disk technology providing the most affordable way to preserve digital assets forever,” Thompson says.

Spectra’s customers trend toward organizations who generate, store, and analyze huge amounts of data, such as life sciences firms, media and entertainment companies, oil and gas outfits, and national supercomputer centers.

Related Items:

Spectra Looks to Drive Tape Storage Into Hadoop

Tape Gets Second Wind as Big Data Mounts

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