Seagate Technology shares new cloud strategy

Seagate Technology is applying its experience working with cloud service providers worldwide to create systems and solutions that manage next generation workloads with the scale, performance and economy aligned to business needs, said Jamie Lerner, President of the newly established Cloud Systems and Solutions group at Seagate. 

“Organisations are looking for cost-effective ways to harness data and create actionable information," he said. 

Much of the data growth is in unstructured data. Industry analyst firm IDC “estimates that in 2015, as far as enterprise disk storage systems are concerned, unstructured data will surpass structured data in terms of both capacity shipped and customer revenue.”* Industry analyst firm Gartner adds that "the explosion in unstructured data, which is growing at 40% to 60% on a yearly basis in most enterprises, has catapulted object storage as an inexpensive, scalable, self-healing, multitenant platform for storing petabytes of data.”**

Seagate Cloud Systems and Solutions has categorised its offerings into four areas:

1. Integrated high-performance computing (HPC) solutions

Seagate’s HPC solutions combine ultra dense data enclosures, operating system, hardware controllers, and the Lustre file system in a consolidated, scale-out high-performance-computing platform. 

2. Custom, modularised systems for OEMs
Seagate has provided over 2 million enclosures and 17,000 petabytes of storage for its OEM customers. The company's open Intelligent Information Infrastructure programme provides private label systems and components for vendors that want to deliver the highest quality information infrastructure products to their customers. 

3. Scalable, modular components and engineered solutions

Seagate provides Intelligent Information Infrastructure solutions to meet the needs of “do-it-yourself" organisations that want to select components and build custom systems to fully integrate solutions for object storage; these software-independent systems are designed for next-generation workloads.

4. Cloud backup/restore, disaster recovery and rapid archive storage services
Seagate, EVault and its partners provide secure public cloud solutions for organisations that need backup, disaster recovery or active archive but do not want to own or maintain the infrastructure. With over 25,000 cloud backup and recovery customers, the Seagate cloud services ecosystem provides a large breadth of backup, recovery, and rapid archive solutions for organisations of all types and sizes. 

*IDC Research, IDC #247106, Structured Versus Unstructured Data: The Balance of Power Continues to Shift, March 2014, by Ashish Nadkarni, Natalya Yezhkova. 

**Gartner research G00254269, Critical Capabilities for Object Storage, 11 February 2014 by Arun Chandrasekaran, Alan Dayley.