Seagate has rolled out the storage industry’s first one-terabyte hard disk drive in the 2.5-inch form factor. Squarely aimed at enterprise data centers and cloud data-storage applications, the Constellation 2 consumes just 6.4 watts of power on average when deployed in directed attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area network (SAN) environments, Seagate said.
Available with standard capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, the Constellation 2 is also being offered with 6Gb/s serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) or 6Gb/s serial attached SCSI (SAS) interface options, noted Seagate Vice President Carla Kennedy. “With its class-leading reliability, record-breaking capacity, and improvements made along its entire range of features, the Constellation 2 drive is a perfect solution for dense server and storage systems,” Kennedy said.
Delivering More Options
IDC projects that hard-disk drive shipments for enterprise applications will increase from 40.5 million units last year to 52.6 million in 2014. What’s more, the research firm expects the HDD industry to ship more petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years.
“We’re definitely seeing intensive cost-cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions,” said IDC Research Manager John Rydning.
With Constellation 2, Seagate’s goal is to fulfill the needs of data-center managers looking for more efficient storage technologies that meet their capacity growth requirements, Rydning noted. “Reaching the 1TB capacity in a small-form-factor design gives IT managers more options to meet capacity requirements with efficient storage platforms,” he said. “IDC expects the use of capacity-optimized drives like Seagate’s 1TB Constellation 2 to increase by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2014.”
Among other things, the 2.5-inch drive’s small form factor will help enterprises maximize their data-center footprints by supporting densities of up to 76TB per square foot, noted…