Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. announced its newest enterprise performance hard disk drive (HDD) line, the AL14SE series, designed for mission critical servers and high-performance, high-availability storage systems.
The appliances are designed for server and storage systems and applications requiring a balance between storage capacity and performance in virtualized storage environments.
“Enterprise-grade HDD provides reliable, cost effective storage capacity for a range of business IT use cases,” Scott Wright, director of Toshiba disk drive product marketing, told eWEEK. “10KRPM HDDs are often employed when both low-latency performance and cost-effective capacity are required.”
The family of drives boast 10,500 rotations per minute (RPM) HDD to support 12Gbit per second SAS and 512n sector length for compatibility with the latest generation host controllers and host bus adapters.
The AL14SE features a new four-platter design, which the company claims has increased storage capacity by 33 percent over the previous AL13SE generation models.
“Storage requirements in today’s business include both traditional database and block storage needs, as well as emerging uses such as data mining and analytics that need to take into account the long-term retention of data and the need to comply with data privacy mandates,” Wright explained.
The AL14SE family is also updated with a 128MB data buffer for improved performance, and provides 12Gbit/s dual-ported SAS support and 512n sector models in industry standard capacities of 300GB, 450GB, 600GB, 900GB and 1200GB.
This newest generation HDD is designed to support original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customizations of value-add features such as optional RAID rebuild assist and optional self-encryption feature sets.
“OEM customization is an important feature for mainstream platform OEM customers who deliver value-add management and optimization features in their branded server and storage platforms,” Wright said. “In such cases, ensuring that the HDD features align with the controller and platform level optimizations may contribute significantly to the OEM’s ability to deliver differentiated features and performance in their server and storage platforms.”
The standard 12Gbit per second SAS feature provides auto-negotiation to 6Gbit per second SAS for legacy host controllers, enabling compatibility within legacy hardware platforms and host controllers.
For applications and hypervisor environments that require storage devices to support 512n sector, the new Toshiba models deliver this sector length with the improved performance of 12Gbit per second SAS and a larger 128MB data buffer.
“Because of changes in breach disclosure laws, businesses are more focused than ever on securing their data; especially customer data,” Wright explained. “Most IT shops will implement some type of security management within their networks and server and storage platforms using software-based security management applications that provide such capabilities as threat defenses and data encryption, all aimed at achieving infrastructure security and data breach prevention.”