The LHC’s collision detectors, which run 24/7, generate approximately 1TB of data per minute, necessitating robust and reliable data storage. Since 2008, CERN has used PROMISE Technology’s 24-bay JBOD VTrak J5800 HDD enclosures, with some of the earliest systems still operational today. CERN has also used Toshiba’s Enterprise Capacity HDDs, starting with capacities of 4TB over ten years ago to the MG09 Series Enterprise Capacity 18TB HDDs.

During this time, the two companies supported CERN in scaling up the storage capacity at its central data centre, which sends this data to more than 170 research institutes around the world for analysis. Today, this storage system has reached a capacity of more than one Exabyte, which is one thousand Petabytes or a million Terabytes, realized with more than 120,000 HDDs sitting in more than 4,000 JBOD enclosures.

Building on this success, PROMISE Technology developed a new 60-bay JBOD model, the VTrak J5960. The JBOD storage system incorporates ‘Greenboost’ technology, a suite of energy-saving innovations that can reduce power consumption by up to 30%. In the HDD application lab, Toshiba completed early testing PROMISE Technology’s 60-bay JBOD with its Enterprise Capacity MG10 Series 20TB HDDs, and confirmed data- and cooling performance and power efficiency, which aligns with the global push towards more sustainable and environmentally friendly data management practices.

About this collaboration achievement in data storage Eric Bonfillou, Deputy Group Leader of CERN’s IT Fabric group states, “In our quest to unravel the mysteries of the universe, we need partners who understand the importance of data storage, reliability, and efficiency with solutions that are tailored to our unique needs.”

“The energy crisis is now a real challenge to all enterprises, including CERN,” Alice Chang, Chief Marketing Officer, PROMISE Technology. “The VTrak J5960 offers a well-rounded solution to solve this dilemma, and we are confident that Toshiba’s Enterprise Capacity HDDs, installed and operated in this JBOD, will support CERN’s future need for growing data storage capacity in a reliable and energy-efficient way.”

“At Toshiba, we are very proud to support CERN’s activities with Enterprise Capacity HDDs,” says Rainer W. Kaese, Senior Manager Business Development, Storage Products Division at Toshiba. “We continue to develop higher capacities, up to 30TB and beyond, as HDDs are and will remain essential for storing the exabytes of data that CERN and the entire world produce in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner.”

While the video celebrates the collaborative work with CERN, the focus remains on the technological advancements and the future of data storage at the research facility. Toshiba and PROMISE Technology are committed to providing solutions that ensure the LHC’s research continues without interruption, contributing to our understanding of the universe.

Check out the GITEX 2024 Special Edition: https://arabianreseller.com/oct2024

The high scalable, 3.5-inch S300 Pro Surveillance HDDs, with capacity options of 4TB, 6TB, 8TB and 10TB, now support up to 24 bays, making them an excellent fit for large-scale video recording systems, delivering reliable operation even in the most demanding environments. Additionally, compared to the previous generation, the new S300 Pro provides a higher maximum sustained transfer speed of 268MiB/s and doubles the cache buffer size to 512MiB. The S300 Pro HDDs also reduce power consumption, delivering improved total cost of ownership (TCO).

With 24/7 operation, an enhanced annual workload of 300TB and mean time to failure (MTTF) of up to 1.2 million hours, the S300 Pro can handle the increasing video analysis demands of mission-critical surveillance footage. The next-generation S300 Pro’s extended warranty period, from 3 to 5 years, demonstrates Toshiba’s high durability and engineering quality of its HDDs.

“Specially optimised for large-scale video surveillance operations, where advanced video analytics, face recognition and editing are mission-critical features, Toshiba’s next-generation S300 Pro delivers enhanced performance, durability, and 24/7 reliability,” says Larry Martinez-Palomo, Vice President, Head of Storage Products Division, Toshiba. “The next-generation S300 Pro Surveillance HDDs demonstrate Toshiba’s commitment to continuously collaborate with industry-leading video surveillance system manufacturers and empower our partners and customers to benefit from our range of high-quality Surveillance HDD portfolio.”

The next-generation S300 Pro Surveillance HDDs will be available in CQ4 2024.

Built for the increasing application demands of enterprise server and storage solutions, the MG10-D Series delivers a new level of performance. For example, compared with the previous model, the new 10TB MG10ADA10TE provides an approximately 13% better maximum sustained transfer speed of 268MiB/s and doubles the cache buffer size to 512MiB. It also reduces power consumption in active idle mode by approximately 21%, to 5.74W. Architected to deliver improved total cost of ownership (TCO), the new MG10-D Series fits seamlessly into a wide variety of business-critical applications, such as email, data analytics, data retention, and surveillance.

“Toshiba’s MG10-D Series delivers exceptional performance to meet the demands of growing business-critical applications. The new cutting-edge design of the MG10-D Series is engineered for sustainable enterprise environments and fits seamlessly into existing infrastructure reducing TCO,” said Larry Martinez-Palomo, Vice President, Head of Storage Products Division at Toshiba.

The MG10-D Series is a 5-disk CMR standard 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM air-filled platform. Available capacities are 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, and 10TB for both SAS and SATA. SATA is also available in a 1TB drive. The series supports 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interface options in Advanced format 512e and 4Kn. A 512n option is available on the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB offerings to support legacy systems with native 512-byte block sizes. Designed for 24×7 enterprise reliability, the MG10-D Series has a workload rating of 550TB, an AFR of 0.44% and an MTTF/MTBF of 2M hours.

The MG10-D Series will be available in CQ3.

So, the digital age has nothing to do with hard drives anymore? Whoever believes that is mistaken. Even if the hard drive is not the first thing that comes to mind for many people when it comes to digital applications, that does not mean that they have no points of contact with classical memory – quite the opposite. In fact, they probably use digital services that depend on hard drives daily: No other storage medium that allows direct access provides such high storage capacities at such low costs. Toshiba names five popular applications of the digital age in which the hard drive plays a crucial role in the background:

Video Streaming: Streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and similar, as well as the multimedia libraries of TV channels or YouTube, hold thousands of videos, often in high resolution, that require an enormous amount of storage capacity. For cost reasons, these volumes of data in the petabyte range can only be stored on hard drives; otherwise, the providers would not be able to refinance the services. This is particularly the case because the videos are not only stored on a central system but copies are also stored on systems in different regions to enable users in any part of the world to access them quickly.

Online Shopping: It is not just at Christmas or Easter time that online shopping is enjoying ever-increasing popularity. However, countless images, product descriptions and product data require plenty of storage capacity, ideally costing as little as possible so as not to further reduce the tight margins in many retail sectors. This is why the bulk of the data is stored on hard drives. Only certain types of temporary data required for quick purchase transactions, such as the shopping cart and payment information, are temporarily stored on all-flash-based storage.

Map Services: Anyone can go travelling digitally today. With their zoom functions, Google Maps and similar opens up highly detailed views of every corner of the world. In large cities, views of the buildings are also available for many streets – older images are even available in some cases, meaning that users can even take a trip back in time for several years. The numerous satellite images, aerial photos and photos of streets require an enormous volume of storage capacity and are therefore held on hard drives in cloud data centres. Google even receives aerial images from government authorities, research institutes and commercial suppliers on hard drives.

Online Memories: Cloud-based memory services such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive are practical for backing up important data or synchronising it across multiple devices. Practically all cloud services store large volumes of data on hard drives at low cost. Special software-defined architectures are used here: These combine a large number of drives in storage pools, delivering much higher performance than individual drives and handling a large number of simultaneous read and write access operations by users and devices.

Social Media Networks: More than five billion people use social media networks, and the figure is increasing daily. The number of photos, videos and audio files uploaded 24/7 seems almost incomprehensible. For Instagram alone the figure is over 1,000 photos per second, and for YouTube more than 500 hours of video material per minute. The network operators would not be able to cope with these volumes of data without hard drives.

Wherever large volumes need to be stored at low cost while being accessed online, there is no alternative to hard drives – regardless of whether it be popular consumer services such as video streaming, modern enterprise applications for ERP and CRM, or digitally monitored and controlled production systems. Whereas many people use smartphones and tablets on a private basis, hard drives – except NAS systems in the home – are now mainly used in data centres, where they bear the main burden of data processing in the digital age. This is why millions of drives continue to be sold year after year, which will remain unchanged over the coming years.

The partnership between Toshiba Gulf and MBUZZ will seek to address the growing requirement for storage in the region with advanced solutions from Toshiba. Especially across the region, as Smart City projects accelerate, there is an exponential growth of video footage being generated by surveillance systems, which in turn is creating a huge demand for reliable, high-capacity storage solutions. The rising demand for video storage also needs to comply with the strict regulations of local authorities which can be met with robust solutions from Toshiba. 

Toshiba offers purpose-built surveillance storage solutions targeting the different requirements of application areas in today’s growing surveillance market. They provide stable 24/7 operation and are optimised for the needs of leading surveillance DVRs and NVRs. “This collaboration between MBUZZ and Toshiba Gulf comes at a crucial time when the demand for Smart Secure Cities and reliable video storage solutions is skyrocketing. In addition to this Big Data is driving demand for more distributed storage in the cloud & on-premise enterprise server & storage systems. Toshiba HDD products provide higher capacity and advanced technology to meet the special demands of datacenter and cloud-scale Infrastructure,” said Santosh Varghese, Vice President at Toshiba GULF FZE.

Toshiba’s advanced storage systems efficiently handle and manage vast amounts of video data, meeting the increasing demands of video storage in Smart Cities. Toshiba’s innovative products empower cities to store and manage video footage effectively, enabling efficient analysis and retrieval when required. “By leveraging Toshiba’s product and technology expertise with MBUZZ’s market reach in Saudi Arabia, this partnership delivers state-of-the-art storage solutions that empower cities to become smarter, safer, and more efficient,” added Santosh.

Through its successful ‘Build your own Data Centre’ initiative in the past year, Toshiba has helped educate the channel including System Integrators and VARs about how enterprise customers can ramp up their Business-critical Enterprise Server Storage Systems, Cloud Storage, Industrial Server, and Storage systems with high-capacity hard drives and meet their growing Data Centre storage requirements. Along with its distributor MBUZZ, Toshiba will seek to further drive this awareness among enterprises of how they can achieve cost-effective enterprise storage for their growing data centre storage requirements.  

MBUZZ, a leading distributor of IT products from leading Technology brands, has in recent years expanded its channel across the region and offers a comprehensive product portfolio that allows for unique solutions to be custom-crafted by a specialised product management team and certified IT and Services Team. This ensures that the best solutions are available for their customers. “We are excited to represent Toshiba, a global leader in storage and to bring their industry-leading storage solutions to our customers,” said Sabir Saleem, CEO at MBUZZ Technologies. “Combining Toshiba’s cutting-edge technology with our expertise in delivering comprehensive solutions allows us to meet the growing needs and provide our customers with top-of-the-line video storage solutions.”