Seagate launches self-healing Exos CORVAULT block storage system

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Seagate launches self-healing Exos CORVAULT block storage system

This will ship with an 18TB drive in all 106 bays. Image courtesy of Seagate.

Seagate has debuted its latest mass-capacity SAN storage, the new 4U high Exos CORVAULT block storage system that can hold up to 106 drives.

Built on the Seagate Exos 4U106 platform, Seagate is touting its “five nines” (99.999%) availability, reliability, and performance built on Seagate’s storage architecture that includes the sixth generation VelosCT ASIC, ADAPT (Autonomic Distributed Allocation Protection Technology) erasure code data protection, and Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR). All included HDDs come standard with Seagate Secure self-encrypting drive (SED) technology and SFTP support for secure file transfers.

Seagate says that CORVAULT is neither JBOD nor RAID, but it offers the high performance of an array and the simplicity of a JBOD.

ADAPT and ADR working together

This self-healing SAN will arrive in July. Image courtesy of Seagate.

ADAPT replaces traditional RAID types with a protection scheme that distributes the parity across a larger set of HDDs or SSDs. This structure enables the Seagate RAID controllers to take advantage of the combined performance of all those drives—versus being tied to a single drive. All drives in the ADAPT

disk group must be the same type, and in the same tier, but can have different capacities. This speeds up data protection and rebuilds are up to 95% faster than with traditional solutions. With ADAPT, system administrators will find scalability, flexibility, and infrastructure that is easier to maintain and expand.

We asked Seagate how the ADR worked, and they said that ADAPT is required when ADR takes place.

ADR minimises human intervention and e-waste, while ADAPT data protection allows de-clustered parity to enable variable drive sizes, lower overhead, and faster rebuilds.

When a drive posts a hard error, the alerted controller offloads data to other drives and removes the drive from the logical volume. The drive and controller are diagnosed, bypassing errors, and regenerating the drive. Volume is rebalanced with the renewed drive. Hence, with self-healing technology, a key differentiator for CORVAULT, the system looks at the drive and rebuilds the drive "in situ" (in place) if a drive needs to be fixed; performance isn't degraded and multi-level erasure coding takes away the vulnerability of the array if another drive goes down during the rebuild time.

Pricing and availability

Besides self-healing, the drives are also encrypted for secure file transfers. Image courtesy of Seagate.

CORVAULT will be available via Seagate distributors Kronicles, Taknet Systems Pte Ltd, and D-RON Singapore Pte Ltd in July. Interested customers are encouraged to contact their distributors directly.