Seagate ST3146855LC Economies of Capacity and Speed: Choosing the most cost-ef - Page 5

Impact of Drive Choice on Overall Reliability The Seagate 10K-RPM and 15K-RPM disc drives carry the highest reliability rating in the industry. Both have multiple generations of field-proven technology. Both drives offer similar low power and cooling requirements, acoustics and rotational vibration-ensuring dependable performance in high-density, high-demand environments. Not surprisingly, 15K storage solutions offer greater reliability simply because their lower drive count compared to 10K-RPM configurations means fewer drives in the system to fail. Similarly, fewer drives require less supporting infrastructure, whose failure could cause system downtime. Additionally, high-performance 15K drives decrease RAID rebuild times. Third-Party Test Results and Applications 15K-RPM drives are designed to excel in a broad range of common applications, from e-mail to business processing to decision support. 10K-RPM drives are better suited for applications where data is infrequently accessed. Storage Performance Council testing, which includes e-mail in its workloads, verifies the cost efficiency of 15K-RPM disc drives. All top SPC price/performance leaders elected to use 15K drives. (see Figure 8) Storage Subsystem Disc Drive IBM Total Storage® FAStT 600 with Turbo Option (non-mirrored) HP StorageWorks (non-mirrored) EVA ZC12D STK-D280 (mirrored) 15K RPM 15K RPM 15K RPM $ per SPC-1 IOPSTM $9.28 $19.99 $16.69 Total ASU Storage Capacity (GB) Total SPC-1 IOPSTM, Data Protection Level, SPC-1 Submission Identiier 478.43 GB 12102.97 SPC-1 IOPSTM, Mirroring A00018 2596.3 GB 24,006 SPC-1 IOPSTM, Non-Mirroring A00021 1196.092 GB 24507.22 SPC-1 IOPSTM, Mirroring A00023 Figure 8. SPC comparison Disc drive capacity has repeatedly multiplied over recent years, placing increasing demands on drive performance in order to maintain acceptable response times and keep pace with the additional data stored on each drive. Changing from 10K-RPM to 15KRPM disc drives enables both servers and external storage systems to deliver 30% more performance, while needing fewer 15KRPM drives to meet performance and capacity requirements. Furthermore, 15K-RPM disc drives have three field-proven generations of reliability, decrease RAID rebuild times and have similar or lower power and cooling requirements, acoustics and rotational vibration compared to 10K-RPM disc drives. For these reasons, the 15K is the drive of choice for the majority of SCSI applications. The bottom line is 15K-RPM disc drives enable higher performance and reduced TCO-key requirements in today's IT departments. 5