- Toshiba’s new European HDD Innovation Lab can improve storage technology
- Lab offers architectural test, proof-of-concept setups and benchmarking
- Toshiba claims to combine dozens of HDDs can increase the overall achievement
Toshiba Electronics Europe has opened a new HDD innovation laboratory at its Düsseldorf site and expanded its storage evaluation services throughout Europe and the Middle East.
The new facility (it already has a smaller in Dubai) is designed to support customers and partners in optimizing hard disk configurations for a variety of applications, including cloud storage, surveillance systems and NAS environments.
Toshibas Laboratory will focus on assessing HDD setups for wider IT systems such as warehouse area network (SAN), providing a space where hardware configurations can be tested and refined. It will be able to evaluate customer-specific architectures and offer a platform for proof-of-concept testing and performance benchmarking.
Combination of hard drives
“This new HDD -Innovation Laboratory represents a significant jump forward in providing tailor -made solutions and promoting HDD technology,” said Rainer Kaese, senior manager for HDD business development.
“It demonstrates Toshiba’s obligation to drive the industry forward and support customers and partners with technical expertise and resources. We look forward to strengthening existing collaborations and exploring the future business opportunities that the new facility will bring.”
To perform these evaluations, the laboratory collects servers, JBODs, chassis, controllers, cables and a variety of software tools. It also includes equipment to accurately measure energy consumption.
While SSDs have a clear speed advantage over HDDs, they are expensive and according to Kaese via Blocks and files“The flash industry is unable to produce enough capacity to meet the growing demand, and still will not be in a significant time.”
The solution to this problem, suggested Kaese, is to pile HDDs together.
“We have demonstrated that 60 HDDs in ZFS Software -Fint Storage can fill the entire speed of a 100 GBE network,” he said, adding, “[We] found that a typical configuration of four HDDs (ie in small soho nas) can fill the 10GBE networks. 12 HDDs match 25GBE Enterprise Networks, and 60 HDDs require high end 100GBE network speed to release the full performance of the many combined HDDs. “
In addition to technical test, HDD -Innovation Laboratory aims to support knowledge sharing. Insights from evaluations will be transferred directly to customers, and Toshiba says it will implement its own internal assessments of its HDD product lines and publish the results such as Whitepapers and Lab Reports.
