Exablox to Support HGST 6TB Helium HDDs

Exablox Corp. announced that its customers are able to take advantage of HGST’s new 6TB Ultrastar He6 drives in its scale-out OneBlox appliance.

Exablox customers can now increase the capacity of existing applications and deploy 50% more capacity with the best cost-per-terabyte.

Exablox’s BYOD strategy enables customers to purchase any industry-standard SAS or SATA disk drives to use within a OneBlox ring. This strategy removes the long qualification cycles that some legacy storage vendors have, which delays customers from using the latest drive technologies. It also brings drive pricing down by a factor of 8-10 by allowing users to purchase third-party branded drives from their preferred vendor. Exablox offers customers the flexibility to mix and match drive types and capacities within a OneBlox appliance. OneBlox’s scale-out architecture, coupled with BYOD, gives customers the ability to upgrade to new drives. In this case, with HGST’s 6TB Ultrastar He6 helium drives, customers can enjoy close to 300TB of raw storage capacity in a global file system namespace.

“I’m expecting our storage capacity will increase by 50% by the end of the year and I’m planning to leverage 6TB drives. However, it’s very hard to switch from 4TB to 6TB drives in a traditional RAID architecture – you have to buy another array, migrate the data off, put the new drives in and then migrate all the data back,” said Greg Williams, CTO, Hooper, Lundy & Bookman, P.C. “With OneBlox I can literally add any number of 6TB drives, at any time, with zero configuration and I’m done. When 8TB drives come out I can make the same kind of upgrade in no time.“

Further enhancing its BYOD strategy, OneSystem multi-tenant cloud-based management platform offers real-time monitoring and reporting of all drives in a OneBlox ring. If a defective drive is found, the storage administrator is notified and the drive can be removed and replaced without impacting data availability and with zero configuration. Because OneBlox is built on Exablox’s object-based file system and not legacy RAID, there are no manual volume reconfiguration, allocation and lengthy rebuild times if a drive needs to be replaced.

HGST’s HelioSeal platform offers the best watt-per-terabyte, terabyte-per-system weight and terabyte-per-square foot. Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the new seven-disk 6TB Ultrastar He6 is the highest capacity HDD on the market, providing the lowest TCO in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. With 6TB, a 5.3 idle watts, running 4-5°C cooler, and a weight of 640g, the new Ultrastar He6 lowers data center TCO on capacity, power, cooling and storage density.

“HGST is an industry leader, pushing HDD capacity and innovation to the limits to help corporate and cloud data centers manage explosive PB growth,” said Brendan Collins, VP marketing, HGST. “Exablox’s strategy affords customers the agility to deploy the industry’s first helium drive, which is designed to increase data center density while lowering OPEX costs, such as power and cooling, thereby improving TCO.“

OneBlox’s object-based file system delivers the flexibility for organizations to mix-and-match drive types for performance and capacity within a single appliance or within a ring. The company enables organizations to purchase the storage capacity needed, take advantage of monthly retail price declines and then add any combination of drives at any time to meet growing capacity demands. Any drive replacement or capacity expansion is instantaneous, requires zero-configuration and pools the storage within the existing global file system to be used by any application. Combined with OneBlox’s inline deduplication, storage waste is minimized and organizations are able to maximize storage utilization.