Announcement of 6TB HDD From Seagate Imminent

Seagate could reveal in few days that the company will offer the availability of a 3.5-inch 7,200rpm HDD this quarter at 6TB, a record reached only by HGST using helium gaz.
Seagate is not in helium technology and it could use SMR with six platters for a cheaper price than HGST helium drive.
But there is no reason to use helium with SMR into the same device and then HGST will have the possibility to beat the current 6TB limit merging the two technologies.
This Seagate's 6TB unit could be revealed for the first time for an external drive.
"We are continuing to expand our offering of high capacity drives with our 6TB drive shipping early next quarter," said Steve Luczo, chairman and CEO of Seagate, during a conference call with financial analysts last January.

Imation Nexsan E-Series With Datacore SANsymphony-V

Imation Corporation, announced that its Nexsan E-Series storage arrays have been certified as DataCore Ready.

When combined with the DataCore SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform, the solution offers data centers rapid ROI through significant improvements in data availability, agility, performance and flexibility.

"Without virtualization, storage and compute capacity are often wasted in application-specific silos. In a virtualized environment, hardware resources can be pooled and optimized from heterogeneous devices, which improves flexibility for the IT administrator," said Mike Stolz, VP marketing and technical services, Imation's Nexsan solutions. "The combined DataCore SANsymphony-V and Nexsan E-Series solution allows IT administrators to create the optimal virtualized storage architecture on highly reliable, proven Nexsan E-Series hardware."

The integrated solution offers benefits including:

• Performance: Using E-Series arrays as a high-performing storage foundation, SANsymphony-V increases performance by supporting RAM caches of up to 1TB to accelerate reads and writes. SANsymphony-V also rebalances loads due to hotspots to further improve response and throughput.
• Provisioning: The E-Series system allows IT professionals to mix-and-match SAS, SATA and SSDs. SANsymphony-V then provisions virtual disks as required to support different types of workloads. Granular thin provisioning and automated capacity reclamation gives administrators more options for improving efficiency.
• Auto-tiering: SANsymphony-V analyzes what blocks of data need higher I/O throughput and assigns those blocks to the appropriate storage tier. Throughout this automated process, priority workloads like SQL databases can be given preference to fast storage including flash, while cooler data or lower prioritized workload data can be moved to lower-cost drives. E-Series storage arrays deliver virtually unlimited flexibility for configuring storage tiers according to capacity, performance and price characteristics, and the solution enables multiple tiers to be configured in a single E-Series system or across other existing storage hardware.
• BC: By keeping data in two physically separate locations at the same time with the help of synchronous mirroring, the combined solution prevents storage from becoming a single point of failure for stretched cluster configurations. Imation and DataCore offer an alternative to expensive storage arrays. DR scenarios also are supported by enabling asynchronous replication across distant sites.
• Migration: Storage investments risk creating more complexity and islands of incompatible devices. SANsymphony-V and E-Series work together to pool existing storage assets, eliminating risk of incompatibility and improving ROI across the entire infrastructure. Also, SANsymphony-V virtualizes data from the underlying hardware, enabling migration of data from legacy systems to E-Series with minimal or no interruption to running workloads