Western Digital Expands HGST Helium Drive Lineup with 10TB Ultrastar He10

HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary, has been shipping hard drives sealed with helium for a couple of years now. Their helium drives have so far come in two flavors – the Ultrastar He drives using platters with traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology and the Ultrastar Archive Ha drives using platters with shingled magnetic recording (SMR). There are two main patented innovations behind the helium drives, HelioSeal and 7Stac. The former refers to placement of the platters in a hermetically sealed enclosure filled with helium instead of air. The latter refers to packaging of seven platters in the same 1″ high form factor of traditional 3.5″ drives.

The Ultrastar He6 6TB drive was introduced in November 2013, and this was followed by the He8 8TB drive late last year. In June 2015, the Ultrastar Ha10 SMR drive with HelioSeal technology was introduced. Around the same time, HGST also made it known that more than 1M HelioSeal units had been deployed. 1.33 TB platters have become available in air drives now, and HGST is taking advantage of that in the 10TB Ultrastar He10. The launch of the Ultrastar He10 PMR drive today also brings the news that more than 4M HelioSeal units have been deployed in various datacenters – pointing to the rapid rise in adoption rate of this technology.

We have already seen in our reviews that the helium drives offer the best performance to power ratio and watts per TB metric amongst all the drives in their capacity class. HGST also claim a 2.5M hour MTBF – much higher than traditional enterprise PMR drives. The initial cost of the helium drives have been substantially higher compared to the standard drives of the same capacity, but the TCO (total cost of ownership) metric is highly in favor of these drives – particularly for datacenter customers who need the drives to be active 24×7. HGST’s press briefing included a slide that presented the potential TCO benefits that come about due to the increased capacity per rack, lower consumption per rack and lower power consumption per TB of the new He10 drives.

HGST indicated that the ramp in volume should help the initial cost to approach that of the air drives in the near future. For datacenter customers, that would mean an acceleration in obtaining the TCO benefits.

Coming to the core specifications, the Ultrastar He10 will come in both SATA 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps varieties. The drives have 4KB sectors, though SKUs with 512-byte emulation are also available. Various data security options such as instant secure erase, self-encryption, secure erase and TCG encryption with FIPS are available.

The standard Ultrastar He drive features such as rotational vibration safeguard (for better RV tolerance in multi-drive servers) and the rebuild assist mode (for faster RAID rebuild) are retained. The drives come with a 256MB DRAM buffer.

Hard drives are struggling to reach the 10TB capacity point with traditional PMR technology. While Seagate did announce a few 8TB PMR drives earlier this quarter, it really looks like vendors need to move to some other technology (shingled magnetic recording or heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)) in order to keep the $/TB metric competitive against the upcoming high-capacity SSDs. As of now, helium seems to be the only proven solution causing minimal performance impact and HGST appears to have a strong hold in this particular market segment.

Intel’s Xeon D Product Family Updated with Storage and Networking-Specific SKUs

Intel’s Xeon D has been one of the most exciting platforms to come out of Intel this year. Xeon D has created more excitement in the micro-server / edge server market compared to the introduction of Avoton and Rangeley (based on Silvermont x86 Atom cores) a few years back. In introducing the 22nm Atom-based server SoCs, Intel clearly delineated different SKUs for different market segments. While Avoton (C2xx0) concentrated on the storage server market, Rangeley (C2xx8) added some communication accelerators that made it a good fit for networking and communication applications.

Xeon D was launched with two SKUs (D1520, a 4C/8T SiP, and the D1540, a 8C/16T SiP) earlier this year. While those two SKUs covered the web hosting applications, today’s launches cover the storage and edge network applications. Intel’s slide from a presentation made earlier today sums up the various products in the lineup. Eight new Xeons and three new Pentium processors are being launched in the D-1500 lineup and they come in both 45W and 35W TDP versions. Interestingly, Intel indicated that 12-core and 16-core Xeon D SiPs can be expected early next year.

Note: The Pentium D Processors indicated in the above slide were not launched despite being part of the slide set. Currently, there are a total of 10 Xeon-D SKUs (as of Q4 2015).

Patrick at ServeTheHome has a nice graphic summarizing the clock speeds and pricing of these products. The D15x1 SKUs target the storage market, while the D15x7 and D15x8 target the networking / communication segments.

Intel claims that the new storage SKUs provide as much as 6x the performance of the high-end Avoton-based platforms.

Intel’s Storage Acceleration Library (ISA-L) provides accelerators for compression, checksumming, parity calculation and cryptograhic functions (encryption as well as hashing).

The Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) provides better optimization compared to the native Linux drivers – particularly as the number of storage devices in the system ramps up.

On the networking front, Intel claims up to 5.4x higher performance compared to the Rangeley-based platforms. Intel is promoting their  Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to achieve better performance for L3 packet forwarding, VM packet forwarding with Open vSwitch, and IPSec forwarding (VPN applications).

ServeTheHome talks about how the communication accelerators have gained extensive software support since they were launched with the Rangeley SoCs in 2013.

One of the disappointing aspects with respect to the D1520 and D1540 (at least for those intending to use them as virtualization hosts) was the pulling back of the advertised SR-IOV feature. It remains to be seen if the new SKUs have the feature enabled.

In addition to the new Xeon D SKUs, Intel also announced the FM10000 Ethernet multi-host controller family that can provide up to 36 Ethernet lanes. The FM10000 family supports 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 10Gbps, and 25Gbps Ethernet ports and the ability to group four lanes as 40Gbps or 100Gbps ports. The integrated Ethernet controllers can be configured as four 50Gbps or eight 25Gbps host interfaces,.

The new X550 single-chip, low-cost 10GbE platform was also launched. It supports NBASE-T technology (for 2.5Gbps as well as 5 Gbps operation, in addition to 10Gbps).

Operating via a PCIe 3.0 x1 / x4 / x8 link, the new 10GBASE-T controller integrates both MAC and PHY in a single package, and comes in both single and dual-port varieties. Power consumption is just 11 W with both 10GbE ports active, making it amenable to passive heatsink thermal solutions.

ASRock Rack Launches Xeon D Motherboards

Intel’s Xeon D SiP (System-in-package) has turned out to be one of the exciting launches this year in the server CPU space. We have already analyzed Xeon D in detail in our review of the Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T. Almost all currently available Xeon D systems / motherboards are from Supermicro, but we now have another set of options from ASRock Rack.

The Xeon D family currently consists of two members:

• Xeon D-1520 : 4C/8T Broadwell-DE x86 cores @ 2.2 GHz, 6 MB of L2 cache, 45W TDP
• Xeon D-1540 : 8C/16T Broadwell-DE x86 cores @ 2.0 GHz, 12 MB of L2 cache, 45W TDP

ASRock Rack’s Xeon D lineup consists of one board using the Xeon D-1520 and six boards using the Xeon D-1540. Customers have the option of going with either the mini-ITX (mITX) form factor or the micro-ATX (uATX) form factor. The mITX boards are all compatible with 1U rackmount chassis.

Gallery: ASRock Rack Xeon D Lineup

In addition to the motherboard size, the differentiation aspects come in the form of support for different varieties of LAN ports, PCIe slot configurations, additional storage ports using the LSI 3008 HBA and different USB 3.0 port configurations. Unlike the mITX boards, all the uATX boards come with a COM port in the rear I/O.The following tables summarize the features of the various products in the ASRock Rack Xeon D lineup.

mITX Boards

uATX Boards

These boards are ideal for network and warm storage devices as well as micro-servers. Given the low power nature of the Xeon D platform, some of them can also be useful in home lab settings for experimenting with virtualization or even act as boards for high-end development machines.