Hewlett-Packard is to ship 2.5-inch disc drives with
enterprise-class features in its ProLiant servers next year and
will add the space-saving technology to its disc subsystems and
arrays at a later date.
Fujitsu Computer Products of America announced that HP has
started testing its 2.5-inch drives, which use the Serial Attached
SCSI interconnect and support data transfer rates of up to
300MB/sec. Seagate Technology will also deliver 2.5-inch drives to
HP and other suppliers during the first half of 2004.
HP will be able to put three of the new drives in the same
amount of space now occupied by one 3.5-inch model, said Jeff
Jenkins, the company's vice president of server storage and
infrastructure. That should let HP increase storage capacity and
data throughput in servers, disc arrays and other non-PC devices
while reducing the size of the boxes.
The 2.5-inch technology is expected to debut in the ProLiant
line in the second half of 2004. HP then plans to roll out
multiple-disc enclosures and modular arrays using the smaller
drives in 2005 and 2006 respectively.
IDC analyst Dave Reinsel said HP is the most aggressive adopter
of 2.5-inch drives among makers of enterprise servers and storage
devices, adding that hardware companies could reduce by two-thirds
the space required for disc drives in blade servers or rack-mounted
systems by switching to the smaller units.
The support for Serial Attached SCSI is another potential
advantage of the Fujitsu drives HP is testing. The serial SCSI
standard uses a point-to-point connection for each drive in an
array, designed to be more scalable than the master/slave
architecture employed by the parallel SCSI technology prevalent
now, Reinsel said. With parallel interfaces, a single controller
must be shared by all the drives on a bus.
The 2.5-inch drives that HP plans to use also can be mixed with
lower-cost Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drives inside
storage systems, said Mike Chenery, vice president of advanced
engineering at Fujitsu Computer Products. Combining the two kinds
of drives would enable users to do backups of their transactional
data within the same box.
The drives are hot-swappable and have dual ports for redundancy,
and they will be sold in 36GB and 73GB models.
However, 2.5-in. drives have a long way to go to overtake their
3.5-inch SCSI counterparts as the top storage technology for
corporate servers and disc subsystems. Reinsel said 3.5-inch SCSI
drives account for 78% of the enterprise-class disc drive market,
with the remainder taken by Fibre Channel technology.
Reinsel predicted that 2.5-inch serial SCSI drives should grab
about 2% of the market next year, with that share growing to 10% by
2006.
"The advantage of 2.5-inch drives most immediately will be in
the internal server storage market," he said. "It'll be a fairly
gradual thing. You have a huge installed base of 3.5-inch slots out
there."
Lucas Mearian writes for
Computerworld