#6: SMR – The Next Generation of Storage Technology

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is the next generation storage technology for continued improvement in HDD areal density, and offers new opportunities for open compute environments. In massive, scale-out cold storage applications such as active archive, social media and long-term data storage, SMR HDD-based solutions offers the highest density, lowest TCO and leading $/TB. This speaking session will clearly articulate the difference in SMR drive architectures and performance characteristics, and will illustrate how the open source community has the distinct advantage of integrating a host-managed platform that leverages SMR HDDs. Further, HGST will discuss how SMR presents the possibility for unprecedented storage capacities, maintains a familiar form factor, and creates a lower-power envelope so architects can create responsive cold storage data pools that can be accessed in near real-time. Learning objectives: Demonstrate how leveraging a SMR HDD provides advantages to a host-managed platform. Show how SMR is enabling cold storage data pools on disk, by vastly increasing the amount of archive data that can be actively accessed. Provide an insight into the future of SMR – what does this mean for next steps of the data center. Slides are available in the show notes at www.snia.org/podcasts.