HDD Shortage, an Argument for Our Technology

CEO and co-founder of Amplidata Wim De Wispelaere wanted to speak to StorageNewLetter.com on the advantage of the company’s Optimized Object Storage following the current HDD shortage. "A 2TB disk costs $80 two months ago, now it’s $160", he said. "Our technology for cloud service providers needs only half the capacity and less power consumption, and we save 70% of the storage costs".

For protection Amplidata does not use RAID controllers but storage nodes on which objects are divided and encoded in redundant data blocks.

To prove the advantages of its technology, the Belgium start-up did some calculations by comparing two 1PB storage systems, one with standard storage servers based on 32TB raw or 24TB user capacity in RAID-6 (6×2) with three copies, the other with its AmpliStor using 20TB raw capacity with a 4-disk failure policy.

In summary, here are savings in favor of AmpliStor:

• 60% in raw capacity
• 92% in disk failures per year (based on AFR%)
• 91% in power consumption (watts)
• 73% in number of racks
• 70% in TCO ($1.2 million compared to $4 million)

Finally a minority of storage companies used the argument of HDD shortage to promote their products. Firms in compression, de-dupe, SRM, etc, could do it. They probably refuse to follow this argumentation for two reasons: 1/ it’s a short-term strategy because HDDs normally will come back to normal prices in the next months. 2/ It’s not excellent for the image of a company to try to benefit of a human and economic drama like Thai flooding.