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Nearline vs. Desktop: Deploying Value in the Data Center

Nearline vs. Desktop: Deploying Value in the Data Center
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Big data may be the biggest market driver du jour, but the long-term trend remains unchanged: The global need for storage capacity races upward without check. “Storage is a critical piece of the infrastructure component, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% between 2011 and 2016,” notes an April 2013 release from IDC. If a company wants to compete in the 21st century, it must process and amass data, and whether it’s in the closet or the cloud, that data must reside somewhere in a dependable, readily accessible manner.

It follows that every company must pay for that storage. But should the drives holding that data emphasize reliability, manageability, performance, low cost, or some mixture of all these? Every organization must struggle to find its own answers. (Note that IDC’s study, allowing for multiple answers found that 68.6% of respondents listed performance as a primary storage criterion while 59.5% selected cost. The jury seems split.) However, when budgets get constrained, many IT groups drift toward cost savings, often for very good reasons.

As a case in point, let’s compare two 4TB Seagate® drives: the Desktop HDD and the enterprise-oriented Constellation® ES. At the time of this writing, the ES in its SATA, bare drive variant cost exactly US$200 more than the bare Desktop HDD on Newegg. It doesn’t take many new storage servers or JBOD add-ons for that US$200 delta to amount to five or six figures of difference. In some cases, this variance can make or break an IT project budget.

How about performance? A side-by-side look at both drives’ spec sheets yields more surprises. Both drives sport 6Gb/s SATA interfaces, but on sustained data rate, the Desktop drive promises 180MB/s (and even 210MB/s on the 3TB, 2TB, and 1TB models) while the Constellation ES tops out at 175MB/s. Wait — weren’t enterprise drives supposed to be faster?


Pouring salt on the enterprise wound, the Desktop HDD features an average idle power consumption of 5.0W and an active seek of 7.5W. The Constellation ES 4TB idles at 6.73W and has an average operating power of 11.27W. Considering that data center drives are supposed to be active throughout most of the day, and if we’re considering deploying dozens or even hundreds of these drives, such differences in energy specs can add up to considerable sums of savings annually.

Is it any wonder that many businesses consider putting desktop drives in their data centers? The specs are solid and the price is right. Unfortunately, in high-volume enterprise environments, this conclusion is short-sighted. Much of what defines “enterprise-class” quality and value is not reflected on product spec sheets, and anyone basing a buying decision solely on those speeds-and-feeds numbers may be terribly under-informed. Above all else, a more complete understanding of what comprises a drive’s enterprise value can help improve total ownership cost to the organization over the long term. This paper will highlight some of the top reasons why.