Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH announced the establishment of a HDD Innovation Lab in Düsseldorf, Germany. The HDD Innovation Lab will evaluate HDD-based system configurations for large IT deployments such as storage area networks (SANs), large-scale network attached storage (NAS), video surveillance platforms and cloud services.
As Rainer Kaese, senior manager of HDD business development at Toshiba, points out, SSDs offer significant advantages over HDDs in terms of speed. However, when storing huge amounts of data, for example for AI applications, building high-capacity systems based on SSDs turns out to be financially impractical: the cost of flash memory-based products is approximately seven times higher than that of HDDs with comparable capacity.
Image Source: Toshiba
In addition, Toshiba demonstrated that 60 hard drives in ZFS software-defined storage can fill the entire bandwidth of a 100GbE network, Kaese said, making HDDs more cost-effective than expensive but fast SSDs for certain types of workloads.
The HDD Innovation Lab will focus on assessing RAID configurations and scalable storage systems for corporate clients, data centers, and cloud providers. A key feature of the site is the ability to test for various architectures. The lab brings together all the main components of a hard disk-based storage system, such as various servers, JBOD arrays, chassis, controllers, cables, and related software. In particular, single-node servers are used that support up to 78 HDDs with a total capacity of up to 2 PB when installing modern high-capacity drives. The site is equipped with precise equipment for analyzing energy consumption.
The lab will perform evaluation work for customers and partners in Europe and the Middle East. Test results will be available on the Toshiba Storage website in the form of technical documents and reports.