SINGAPORE, Oct 26 — Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX) today announced a new interoperability milestone designed to simplify high-capacity storage expansion as AI and cloud workloads drive continued data growth.
Seagate Mozaic™ drives, based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and configured with shingled magnetic recording (SMR), are the first and only SMR drives added to Broadcom’s approved vendor list for its host bus adapter (HBA), which connects servers to storage and enables data centers to deploy and manage large fleets of hard drives.
Microsoft Azure Storage has completed qualification of the Broadcom HBA with Seagate HAMR + SMR technology, providing a real-world proof point for the configuration at hyperscale.
AI and Cloud Growth Puts New Demands on Data Infrastructure
AI and cloud workloads are driving continued data growth, increasing the need for storage infrastructure that can scale efficiently. For large-scale data centers, that means not only adding higher-capacity drives, but efficiently connecting, managing and scaling large hard drive fleets.
“High-capacity storage innovation delivers the greatest value when customers put that capacity to work efficiently,” said Jason Feist, Senior Vice President, Cloud Business. “By pairing Seagate HAMR + SMR storage technology with Broadcom’s connectivity infrastructure, we’re helping make high-capacity SMR storage more accessible and easier to deploy as AI and cloud data demands grow.”
Expanding Access to High-Capacity SMR
Broadcom’s HBA provides the communication path between servers and storage devices, allowing large numbers of hard drives to be connected, addressed and managed by the host system.
“Expanding HBA support for Seagate SMR technology gives more customers a straightforward path to integrate and manage high-capacity hard drive fleets,” said Jas Tremblay, Vice President and General Manager Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom. “It’s an important step toward making HAMR + SMR storage easier to implement across large-scale environments as storage requirements continue to grow.”
Advancing Capacity for Data-Intensive Workloads
Seagate’s Mozaic platform leverages HAMR technology and enables continued increases in storage density and drive capacity. HAMR-based Mozaic drives can also be configured with SMR technology, which organizes data tracks more densely to increase usable capacity for appropriate workloads.
“At hyperscale, storage infrastructure has to meet demanding requirements for interoperability, manageability and infrastructure efficiency at scale,” said Pablo Ziperovich, general manager, Azure Memory and Storage Center of Excellence at Microsoft. “Microsoft Azure’s joint validation and qualification of Seagate and Broadcom’s SMR configuration demonstrates how these technologies can work together across large data center deployments, enabling greater storage density at a similar cost and power envelope.”