Seagate Release New All-Flash & Hybrid RealStor 5 Arrays

by Adam Armstrong April 3, 2017

written by Adam Armstrong April 3, 2017

Today Seagate Technologies announced that it has added two new additions to its RealStor 5 Series. Seagate has added the all-flash RealStor 5005 all-flash array (AFA) aimed at demanding data environments. And the RealStor 4005 hybrid array that for users that need high performance but still want to leverage HDDs for economic reasons.

Flash adoption has really taken off over the last few years. Not only does flash offer tremendous performance benefits over spinning disk, recently there have been density increases with reported capacities as high as 100TB in a 3.5” form factor. As density goes up price has been coming down. More and more data centers have been adding flash in and some run completely in flash now. Seagate, in our opinion, had been lagging behind some of its competitors in its flash offerings. But in recent months they have been making strides to remedy this with offerings such as their 60TB SAS SSD, the demonstration of the world’s fastest SSD at the time, and now new flash options in the RealStor family aimed at the midmarket.

The RealStor 5 series consists of both the 5005 and 4005. Seagate states that this series combines Seagate’s deep software stack and systems approach, including a controller architecture that taps its unique ASIC design, and enables high data availability and performance at aggressive cost points. The RealStor 5 Series leverages Seagate technology such as auto-tiering to gain the best of both worlds, sending the high performance needs to flash, and the colder larger data to the spinning disks.

The RealStor 5005 AFA is aimed at use cases where latency is one of the main concerns, for example multi-branch office environments. Seagate states that the 5005 can hit 400K IOPS at 1 millisecond latency. Not only that, Seagate goes on to state that the 5005 can hit 300K IOPS with latency below 300 microseconds.

Not all organizations will need the above performance, so the RealStor 4005 is a better option for those that want the benefits of both flash and spinning disks. The RealStor comes in three configurations: all-flash, hybrid, and all spinning disks. An ideal use case for the 4005 is surveillance where some data needs performance but there are large chunks of cold data that need good, cost-effective storage that HDDs provide. The hybrid version can use the auto-tiering technology to move the data where it needs to be optimizing performance and storage efficiency.

Key Specifications:

Models: 5005 | 4005
Form factor: 2U
Drive bays: Up to 24
Drive support: SAS SSD | SATA SSD
Max capacity: 77TB | 46TB
Memory: 32GB | 16GB
Performance
- IOPS at 1ms latency: 400K | 250K
- Read Throughput: 7GB/s
- Write Throughput: 5.5GB/s
Physical
- Height: 3.46 in / 87.9 mm
- Width: 17.44 in / 443 mm
- Depth: 24.8 in / 630 mm
- Weight: 38 lb / 17 kg (diskless)
Thin Provisioning
Snapshots
Replication
RAID support: 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, and 50
Mirrored Cache
Supercapacitor Cache Backup
Cache Backup to Flash
HA features:
- Redundant Hot-Swap Controllers
- Redundant Hot-Swap Devices, Fans, Power
- Dual Power Cords Hot Standby Spare
- Automatic Failover
- Multi-Path Support
Management
- Interface Types: 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Mini USB
- Protocols Supported: SNMP, SSL, SSH, SMTP, HTTP(S)
- Management Consoles: Web GUI, CLI
- Management Software: RealStor Storage Management Console
Power Requirements – AC Input
- Input Power Requirements: 100-200VAC 50/60Hz
- Max Input Power: 346W maximum continuous
- Heat Dissipation: 1181 BTUs/hour
- Gold rated power supplies
Temperature and Humidity Ranges
- Operating Temperature: 5°C to 35°C (41°F to 95°F)
- Shipping Temperature: -40°C to +70°C (-40°F to +158°F)
- Operating Humidity: 20% to 80% non-condensing
- Non-Operating Humidity: 5% to 100% non-precipitating