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,