In Broadcast - March 2018 - 63

63

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 3 | March 2018

InFile

Multi Actuator Technology:
A New Performance
Breakthrough
Boosting capacity is half the solution. If fast data access doesn't keep pace,
the potential of data is limited, writes Seagate's Jason Feist...

C

omputing
power,
storage
capacities, and reduced latency
- all must keep moving forward if
technology innovators are to continue
to help solve humanity's greatest
challenges.
To that end, Seagate unveiled today
its new Multi Actuator technology, a
breakthrough that can double the data
performance of its future-generation
hard drives in hyperscale data centres.
As higher areal densities on future
hard drives put downward pressure on
performance, Seagate's Multi Actuator
technology will more than offset these
pressures. That means customers
with data-intensive applications will
continue to enjoy the highest levels
of hard drive performance, while
they simultaneously keep up with the
need to manage vast, ever-increasing
quantities of data.
Development
Seagate's Multi Actuator technology
is in development to be deployed on
products in the near future.
An actuator is the component that
moves a hard drive's heads over the
media surface, to read and write data.
Each recording head sits at the end of
a moving actuator arm. Hard drives
today are equipped with a single
actuator, which moves all the readwrite heads together in synchronous
motion.

In its first generation, Seagate's
Multi Actuator technology will equip
hard drives with dual actuators
(two actuators). With two actuators
operating on a single pivot point,
each actuator will control half of the
drive's arms. Half the drive's recording
heads will operate together as a unit,
while the other half will operate
independently as a separate unit.
This enables a hard drive to double
its performance while maintaining
the same capacity as that of a single
actuator drive.
"Seagate Hard Drives are about to
embark on a new exponential growth
in capacity with the introduction of
EAMR technologies like HAMR (HeatAssisted Magnetic Recording)," says
Aaron Ogus, Microsoft Azure Storage
Architect. "In most datacentre
applications the additional capacity
gains cannot be effectively utilised
without improvements in device IO
capacity. The dual actuator technology
helps unlock additional IOPS (Input/
Output Operations per Second) and
allows Cloud providers to make
effective use of the new capacity
gains."
"We're
leveraging
our
longtime leadership in engineering all
elements of hard drive technology to
provide a solution with breakthrough
performance,
within
industry
standards," says James Borden,

Heat-Assisted
Magnetic Recording

Dual arms: Seagate Multi Actuator technology

Principal Product Strategist at Seagate.
"Our Multi Actuator solution is based
on proven technology and adheres to
current standards, so it'll plug-andplay into today's infrastructure."
Intra-Drive Parallelism
Parallelism is a strategy of IT
architecture in which a host computer
is set up to send multiple operational
requests simultaneously to multiple
devices; executing multiple operations
at once means the work gets done
faster. When it comes to writing and
accessing data, parallelism is already
used in hyperscale datacentres when a
host accesses data from multiple hard
drives at once.
Seagate's new Multi Actuation
technology is a way to put the
performance of parallelism within
a single hard drive unit. The host
computer can treat a single Dual
Actuator drive as if it were two
separate drives. This means the
host computer can ask a single
high-capacity drive to retrieve two
different data requests simultaneously
- delivering data up to twice as fast
compared with a single-actuator drive.
By
choosing
higher-capacity
hard drives with Multi Actuator
technology, IT architects will enjoy the
performance benefits of parallelism
while retaining the benefits of
deploying the highest capacity hard

drives available, including lower
acquisition cost-per-TB and reduced
footprint costs.
"Basically, we're taking the highcapacity hard drive a customer already
needs and expects, and magically
doubling the IOPS the customer gets
from it - with no down side," says
Borden.
Performance & Capacity
The insatiable hunger for greater
storage capacity is accelerating
at an astronomical rate, with the
proliferation
of
rapidly-evolving
technologies
such
as
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and the continued
emergence of the Internet of Things
(IoT).
Increases in affordable storage
capacity continue to enable the digital
revolution. As the world's leading
datacentre storage provider, Seagate
has developed a new HAMR technology
that will provide for the Datasphere's
highest real density needs. Beginning
with new HAMR-enabled EXOS hard
drives - which will be in pilot volumes
next year and full volume in late 2019
- we'll deliver the next leap forward in
data storage density and affordability.
However, capacity is only half of
the solution. If the ability to rapidly
access data doesn't keep pace with
all that capacity, the value potential
of data is inhibited. Therefore,
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