Podcast #120: Seagate Exos CORVAULT

Recently, Brian took a trip to Longmont, Colorado, to look at the Seagate Exos CORVAULT, a high-density storage platform five years in the making! We followed up his visit by posting a deep dive into the CORVAULT, looking at everything from unboxing to setup and highlighting the many features associated with this technology.

Brian’s guest on this show is Erik Salo, Seagate’s vice president of product and business marketing. Erik has been with Seagate for over ten years and has had his hands on everything from distribution, storage, and cloud-edge technology. With that kind of background, Erik was the perfect choice to get some background on this new storage platform.

The concept for CORVAULT was hatched during a meeting, thinking about all the sophisticated and innovative technology used in building Seagate products. Erik believed that, instead of thinking of storage in single 3.5-inch increments, it might be time to think in terms of hundreds of those 3.5-inch products in a high-density platform. The discussion moved to cloud storage, and the numbers just kept growing.

This is a podcast with plenty of detail about what goes into creating a product like CORVAULT. It is certainly worth a view, but if you need just to hit some highlights, the video is transcribed below.

00:00 Introduction (recorded on-site in Longmont, CO)

CORVAULT background
Think about storage differently
How to manage those disks
Focus
Erasure encoding
Failure management

05:00 Dramatic changes in scale

Server overhead
Server management
Inefficiency when making all products the same
Built for resiliency
Costs
Erik’s history in replacing drives
Smart drives

10:00 Smart drives know

Servers are smart enough to know what capacity remains
Self-resilient systems
Who makes up the customer population
- Enterprise
- Cloud
Staying focused
How do customers decide on storage technology
- What do they want to do
- How do they want to do it
- How much will it cost
- What hardware is available

15:00 Building out infrastructures in the lab

Focus on core competence
How software uses storage
Deciding what goes into a system
Keep it simple
Use cases for specific products
What if a customer doesn’t need 106 drives
A smaller unit with all the same features

20:00 Bigger, Bigger, Bigger

From floppies to Terabytes
How much of the data is useful
Surveillance videos
Sophistication

25:00 Helping customer figure out what’s next

Seagate is an adopter of all the technology
- AI
- High volume manufacturer
- Components are still hard to get
Companies stopped ordering during COVID
Seagate has a long-term view

30:00 How to get customers interested

Three step process
- Reference ArchitectureWhat about flash
- Provide demo unit
Performance of CORVAULT
What is the system tuned for
What about flash
Managing supply chain

35:00 Conclusion

Subscribe to our podcast:

Engage with StorageReview

11 months ago

Harold Fritts

I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.