Seagate RealStor 5005 and RealStor 4005 All-Flash and Hybrid Storage Arrays

Seagate made the announcement on its blog.

Seagate Technology plc pushes performance and cost boundaries with all-flash and hybrid storage arrays

RealStor 5 Series brings benefits of flash performance to more data centers while leveraging existing HDD investments.

For enterprise data centers, the performance improvements from incorporating flash into storage systems have long been known, but it simply has not been economically feasible for many of them. Meanwhile, as business data continues to expand exponentially, these organizations face an ever growing need to quickly and easily access the right, actionable information.

Fortunately, the question isn’t simply a matter of adopting flash or falling behind. And the HDDs drives long used by enterprises to store vast quantities of data aren’t suddenly obsolete. Instead, flash technologies can be applied as complementary to existing HDD investments to help enterprises get the most out of their data, and new technologies are emerging to do this in a cost-effective manner.

Case in point: At the company, we’re introducing two new additions to our RealStor lineup with the RealStor 5 series of all-flash storage and hybrid arrays, giving businesses the kind of performance storage that has previously only been accessible to larger data centers-now at an affordable price.

Here’s some market context from Eric Burgener, director, storage research director, IDC, “The all-flash array market overall has one of the highest growth rates in external storage, and is expected to grow at a 26.2% CAGR to crest $9.29 billion in 2020. The rapid growth of these systems has been driven by the value that they deliver, but the market for all-flash systems under the $100,000 price point has been slow to take off. Systems like the Seagate RealStor 5005 array, however, set a new bar for value in these price ranges by delivering up to 300,000 IO/s at sub 300μs latencies and 20TB of raw flash capacity in just 2U of rack space, all starting at under $50,000. This is the type of performance, scalability and value that should drive much stronger penetration of all-flash systems for small and medium business and midmarket customers.“

The RealStor 5 series-including the RealStor 5005 and 4005-deliver on this, combining company’s deep software stack and systems approach, including a controller architecture that taps its unique ASIC design, and enables high data availability and performance at aggressive cost points. The firm such as auto-tiering leverage the benefits of both flash and HDDs by automatically moving data to the most effective media based on application needs, further exemplifying the complementary nature of flash and HDDs in enterprise and cloud deployments. In addition, the system components are built and tested to work together, reducing failure rate and eliminating the need to upgrade an entire system instead of simply one component.

RealStor 5005
The RealStor 5005, an all-flash array, is for demanding data environments where speed and latency are critical. Think multi-branch office environments, which typically have lower capacity requirements but high performance needs. The system can achieve 400,000IO/s at one millisecond latency – and at aggressive cost points. For environments where latency is paramount, the RealStor 5005 can go even further, reaching latencies sub 300μs for 300,000 IO/s-far faster than the one millisecond classic industry benchmark for all-flash array response time.

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RealStor 4005
For organizations not needing the full horsepower offered by the RealStor 5005, the RealStor 4005 is an option. It is available in three personalities: as an all-flash array, a hybrid array mixing flash with HDDs, or as an all-HDD array. It is for applications like video surveillance, where quick access to some data is necessary, but a large amount of data remains ‘cold’ and unused. The RealStor 4005 with the hybrid variant can automatically promote data to flash if fast access is required, but otherwise keeps data stored on cost effective HDDs.

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RealStor 5 series is available through the company’s partners.