Moving Into the Lite
Moving Into the Lite
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No one will be surprised to learn that, according to Seagate stats, data capacity in enterprises continues to grow at an average rate of 40% to 60% annually. The mass of structured and unstructured data alike keeps exploding with unabated velocity. As more companies find themselves tied to this storage race, the value of cloud-based storage services as an alternative to trying to manage such growth internally keeps climbing.
Less obvious is the fact that end-users and small businesses face similar storage growth challenges. Just as enterprises turn to public and private cloud services to solve their storage and distributed sharing needs, end-users need better ways not only to protect their increasing terabytes of personal data but share that data — everything from calendar schedules to movie collections — across a rising number of personal devices in what is increasingly being called a “personal cloud.”
“The global Personal cloud market is estimated to grow from US$6.6 billion in 2013 to US$43.5 billion in 2018,” predicts analyst firm MarketsandMarkets. “This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.61% from 2013 to 2018. In the current scenario, individual users will continue to be the largest market for Personal cloud services but small and medium business users are also set to adopt this service in the near future to a larger extent.”

No matter which type of cloud is being discussed or how large it is, a few facts remain constant: Capacity and cost are key. Cloud storage doesn’t have to be fast. No one is counting IOPS when it comes to uploading and synchronizing data for safe nearline storage. Certainly, drive performance should be sufficient for streaming files to appropriate numbers of concurrent users, but the performance bottleneck will likely be at the network level, not the storage subsystem. Quite simply, there’s no reason to pay for 2TB 10K-RPM drives when 3TB 7200-RPM drives will yield the same effective throughput to users and deliver more capacity for the dollar.
More importantly, though, cloud-optimized hard drives should be reliable. The more people depend on access to a drive’s data, or the more important that data is, the more that drive should resist failure. That’s not to say it can’t fail. No product can claim that. But every product has some sort of annualized failure rate, and cloud storage should reflect the highest levels of enterprise dependability, even if drive pricing veers closer to consumer-class levels.
Enterprise buyers typically buy “nearline” drives for bulk cloud storage needs. These drives don’t carry the steep price tags of top-tier hard drives or SSDs because they tend to be slower while still offering the range of other features typically associated with high-end enterprise drives. However, cloud storage buyers often don’t need all of these features. Their emphasis on capacity and price usually pushes them into buying desktop drives, but these consumer-class drives are not built for enterprise workloads and thus exhibit dangerously high failure levels in cloud storage applications.

The solution is a new hard drive category informally called “nearline lite” (NLL). These drives are specifically tailored for a special mix of capacity, price, and reliability that cloud storage buyers of all stripes and sizes will find valuable (which is why NLL drives are also referred to as “bulk cloud storage,” or a similar term). Read on to see exactly what constitutes a nearline lite drive and whether such products can help with your own storage needs.