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Many organizations are looking for low-cost, high-density, “enterprise-ready” storage options that offer additional data services, operational benefits, and advanced features over and above typical JBOD systems. Seagate Exos CORVAULT delivers all that and more with an easy-to-consume, high-capacity solution that bridges the gap between storage arrays and JBODs, providing a powerful combination of availability, efficiency, and management.
Seagate Exos CORVAULT Hardware Overview
Seagate has been in the disk drive business for over three decades covering commercial, enterprise, and consumer products. The latest storage technology out of Seagate is CORVAULT, a fully-integrated, modular system that includes drives, power supplies, cooling, and other components that deliver a single package that supports over 2.0PB of storage. CORVAULT is a high-performance, self-healing block storage system that provides multi-petabyte capacity, five-nines availability, and hyperscale efficiencies for data center and macro-edge environments.
ADAPT Data Protection
CORVAULT is built to provide high availability and durability, with features like dual-ported disk drives and redundant power supplies that deliver “five-nines” enterprise-grade uptime. Seagate’s latest erasure encoding data protection software, ADAPT, streamlines overhead, throughput, management, and recovery and replaces traditional RAID types with a protection scheme that distributes the parity across a larger set of HDDs.
ADAPT is not just another acronym. System administrators will benefit from a system that is easier to maintain and expand. ADAPT’s parallel architecture reduces rebuild time by up to 95 percent, meaning a rebuild that used to take days can be completed in minutes. The self-healing system automatically allocates spare capacity to recover common device failures. Although the drives must be the same type, mixed drive capacities are supported to maximize usable capacity and reduce the cost per TB.
Self-Healing With ADR
Seagate’s Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR) is a system that heals itself on the fly. ADR is only possible with Seagate’s ADAPT data protection, designed as a solution to reduce human intervention. By automatically renewing instead of discarding hard drives, ADR reduces the environmental impact of computer e-waste. ADR minimizes the need to swap disk drives and, in many cases, returns them to dependable service by reconfiguring the drive to bypass problematic components.
Easy to Manage, Energy Efficient, and Secure
Seagate provides well-documented procedures to install and set up CORVAULT. The system is designed to be easy to get up and running, with an intuitive web-based management interface and various monitoring and diagnostic tools. There is also a command line interface used for the initial setup.
Intuitive Management Interface
Seagate provides precise details for rack mounting CORVAULT, connecting cables, powering up, and logging in. After the unit is racked and ready to power up, there are some initial tasks to connect to and configure the system, such as setting up a user, logging in, and setting a valid IP address for each controller module (CM) serial COM port.
There are three options for accessing CORVAULT:
- Connect to the controller module (CM) using a serial cable directly connected to the COM port allowing access to the Storage Management Console (SMC).
- Connect remotely via the network to the serial port for access to the SMC using the factory default IP addresses.
- Connect remotely via the network using secure shell (SSH) to the default IP addresses.
If the default IP address is not compatible with the network, it will be necessary to manually set a valid IP address for each network port.
Seagate Exos CORVAULT Popular Use Cases
A high-performance, self-healing block storage system with multi-petabyte capacity, five-nines availability, and hyperscale efficiencies for data center and macro-edge environments make CORVAULT the go-to system for numerous use cases. CORVAULT is built on a modular chassis with added components that protect against vibrational and acoustic interference (as described earlier), excess heat, and external power irregularities. The system is fitted with redundant, hot-swappable power supplies to ensure consistent and efficient noise-free power that delivers responsive burst capacity. The drives, controllers, and fans are all hot-swappable to provide uninterrupted performance when service is required.
All these features available in the CORVAULT Storage System make it a strong solution for any of the following use cases:
- Backup & recovery
- Big Data Analytics (AI/ML)
- Cloud Backup
- Data Migration
- Data Transfer
- Edge Deployment
- High-Performance Computing (HPC)
- Multicloud, Private Cloud, and Public Cloud
- Storage-as-a-Service
- Video Analytics
Based on the extensive list of features available, CORVAULT is a fit for just about any organization. This might be the system that fits the “no-brainer” category. CORVAULT takes the chore of configuring a storage system and does it for the customer. Seagate ticks just about all the boxes on CORVAULT.
Conclusions
Seagate designed CORVAULT to take the guesswork out of configuring a storage system that fits most industries’ requirements, from density to one-button configuration to management. Features like ADAPT and ADR lift the burden of maintenance from over-stretched IT administrators.
CORVAULT has been engineered to be more energy efficient and with less environmental impact, with features like power-saving modes, efficient cooling, and less waste, thanks to ADAPT and ADR. Reliable performance is assured with five-nines availability. Sharable across multiple networks and applications, CORVAULT’s multiple host support eliminates data silos. CORVAULT also took security to the next level with self-encrypting technology on all included HDDs without the controller-level overhead. SFTP support for secure file transfer is also included.
Ultimately Seagate Exos CORVAULT delivers an easy-to-consume, cost effective, high-capacity solution that provides a powerful combination of availability, efficiency, and management that is applicable in a number of use cases ranging from HPC and AI to backup and recovery.
