Seagate has begun worldwide shipment of its one terabyte (TB) enterprise-class Barracuda ES.2 hard drives with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface.

Applications addressing rich media content and collaborative applications like email can benefit from the average 135 per cent performance boost over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features and native compatibility, said an official spokesman.

“The explosion of content in enterprise environments is driving the need for faster data access and bandwidth that Seagate’s 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives can deliver with a SAS interface,” said Seagate senior vice-president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business, Sherman Black.

“SAS dual-port capability with redundancy, improved performance and data integrity make this drive the perfect low-cost/GB enterprise-ready drive for our customers.”

SAS also enables greater system-design and integration flexibility for solution providers who are eager to offer even greater value options to their customers.

“The higher performance and inherently lower total cost of ownership (TCO) make Barracuda ES.2 drives with SAS a perfect choice for many of our customers,” said vice-president, Marketing at Bell Microproducts, Joe Cousins.

“With the added enterprise features found within SAS all merging into a lower-cost package, we anticipate our customers will be very interested in building and deploying SAS-based systems with Seagate drives.”

With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2 drive, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface option in addition to its SATA model, which began shipping last year. For major system providers including HP, SAS offers greater levels of data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline enterprise environments.

“As a leader in the enterprise, HP ProLiant servers and storage technologies help customers to manage their datacenter infrastructure with confidence,” said vice-president, Industry Standard Servers, HP, Ron Noblett.

“We’re pleased to align with Seagate for their hard drive expertise as the new SAS 1TB drive is added to the HP portfolio of Midline drives. These drives will provide the ‘pennies per GB economics’ of SATA Midline with additional performance as well as the dual port capability our external storage customers demand.”

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive with SAS is optimized for business-critical and nearline enterprise storage environments that demand native enterprise host compatibility. This means no SATA interposer card costs and complexity, along with all the advantages including dual-port, full duplex capability and a host of enterprise class features for high system-level performance and reliability. – TradeArabia News Service