SEAGATE : Marking drive innovations in the surveillance arena
Q. Seagate has been operational for long time in the surveillance hard drive space industry,please share some of your milestones & achievements?
An industry leader in surveillance-optimized storage for over 10 years, Seagate is committed to deliver the most reliable and robust surveillance-optimized drives the market has seen. Back in 2006, we released the industry’s first surveillance-tuned HDD series, designed to record 24×7 from multiple cameras simultaneously.
Marking a decade’s purpose-built drive innovation in the surveillance industry, we introduced SkyHawk surveillance drives in 2016, reaching 10 TB, 180 TB/year workload rating (3x that of a desktop drive) and supporting as many as 64 cameras. Today the name SkyHawk is the hallmark in surveillance, offering under its aegis efficient storage for every surveillance solution, including the first ever drive created specifically for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled
video surveillance solutions – SkyHawk AI HDD.
The drive provides unprecedented bandwidth and processing power to manage always-on, data-intensive workloads, while simultaneously analyzing and recording footage from multiple HD cameras.
Q. Could you brief us about overall business activities of SEAGATE (tieups, associations, reach, network)?
Seagate is a world leader in data solutions, delivering world-class, precision-engineered data management solutions. At Seagate, we care foremost about data potential and its impact on the human experience. We believe creating data storage solutions with breakthrough technology, precision engineering,and consumer collaboration is the key to providing tangible value. For over 40 years, Seagate has driven data innovations.
Our products have empowered billions of individuals and businesses to pursue their dreams and realise their full potential. Seagate’s partners play a vital role in our business. We connect with our customers and partners in the markets through the Seagate Insider partner program. Seagate has been continuously building a robust partner base through this programme, providing comprehensive training sessions and seminars as well as working on co-marketing initiatives.
Seagate also continuously provides training for partners to better understand evolving opportunities in addition to regular products and technology trainings. Seagate’s SkyHawk Partner App is a great example of how we empower our partners and customers. Designed specifically for India, the SkyHawk Partner App enables partners to calculate the storage needs and investment required on the spot. It provides online warranty service booking and tracking, and provides instant connectivity to SeaCare centres. Our aim is to support our partners in maximising their results by offering the best and most optimal storage solutions and services.
Q. Can you elaborate more about the product portfolio & it’s applications?
External Products
Sleek, dependable products that let our customers automatically and continuously store digital family photos, protect and access critical business data, stream and share media, save favorite games, and back up multiple computers on a small network.
Data Recovery Services
Delivering best-in-class data recovery results and turnaround times on all types of storage media and brands.
Internal Products
The industry’s broadest portfolio of drives created and tailored specifically for your applications.
Data Center Products
Innovative storage that enables our customers to remain competitive and relevant by meeting the ever-changing dynamics of IT.
Q. Which are the some of your pioneering products you introduced in the market recently or is there any plan to launch the new products?
To address the changing infrastructure and data management needs tomorrow’s explosive data and storage growth demands, we are focused on developing emerging technologies for capacity and performance.
Seagate’s Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology enables us to deliver higher capacity in the industry’s standard form factor, thereby providing customers with the best-costper-TB. To meet customer demand, our advanced engineering team is delivering the future of high-capacity hard drives now.
Using HAMR technology, we recently built and tested the world’s first formatted and fully functioning 16TB enterprise hard drive platform in a standard 3.5-inch form factor —the highest capacity hard drives ever produced, and we are currently on track to grow beyond 20TB per drive.
The potential value of data is inhibited if the ability to rapidly access data doesn’t keep pace with all that capacity, which is why there must also be increased performance alongside higher capacity. Our ground-breaking Multi Actuator technology (MACH.2™) can double the data performance of future generation hard drives.
Customers with data-intensive applications will be able to continue to enjoy the highest levels of hard drive performance, while simultaneously keeping up with the need to manage vast, ever-increasing quantities of data. Together, HAMR and Multi Actuator technologies provide the future of capacity and performance hyperscale data centres require. As the leader in data storage solutions, Seagate will continue to offer innovative solutions that will meet evolving business needs.
Q. How do you foresee “India” as a potential market, what are the prospects?
Data is the bedrock of India’s Digital Economy. As governments and businesses in India accelerate on their journey to digital transformation, a solid digital strategy will be key for success in the data age, with data technologies becoming central for productivity expansion, data monetisation and value creation.
With the government’s Digital India campaign and the National Institution for Transforming India’s (NITI Aayog) AI policy increasing usage of IoT and AI applications, there will be rapid growth of embedded data, raising the demand for real-time data processing and more effective storage solutions.
Organisations will need to build on their central cloud computing architecture and develop the ability to process – and, equally importantly, securely store – more data at the Edge. As they increase their Edge investment, enterprises must have the right setup to withstand the huge increases in data volume and costs that are coming down the line. The future will be about Edge and cloud working together to help businesses make smarter decisions instantly and drive up productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Q. According to you what are the factors maffecting to your business? What are the key technological trends that are driving the industry?
IDC’s The Digitization of the World –From Edge to Core report estimates that the amount of new data worldwide will increase to 175ZB. The exponential growth of data shows no signs of slowing, as technologies like IoT, AI and 5G continue to evolve and see increased usage. IoT real-time data will make up a large portion of this, with more than 150 billion devices that will be connected across the global datasphere.
Data is also the lifeblood behind AI applications. Increased AI adoption will naturally lead to growth in data volumes, with organizations across industries stepping up the frequency, flexibility and immediacy of data analysis to drive strategic decisions and actions. Amidst all of this, the rise of the Edge is resulting in market expansion with new verticals. As more devices come online and begin churning out zettabytes of data, the centralized cloud will need support from the edge– impacting the size and location of data centres that are built in the future.
Putting new compute, networking and storage resources in close proximity to the devices creating the data makes it possible to analyze data on the spot, delivering faster answers to important questions, such as how to improve factory robotics or whether an autonomous car should apply the brakes.
The rise of the edge will drive big demand for new and redesigned data management infrastructure. A typical smart factory, for example, will create about 5 petabytes of video data per day. A smart city with 1 million people could generate 200 petabytes of data per day, and an autonomous vehicle could
produce 4 terabytes of data per day. This presents a significant opportunity for us – according to our estimates, emergence of edge storage will drive incremental $3B – $6B TAM by 2025.
Q. What are your strategies to improve the SEAGATE‘s position in Indian & global market as well?
Through technology investments, we are aligning our offerings with the emerging trends in the market here in India and globally to bring innovative solutions that will meet evolving business and consumer needs. We remain focused on developing data storage products and solutions to help organisations across all industries and verticals design, understand, maintain and use their infrastructure to better manage and leverage the exponential growth of data volumes to drive positive outcomes for their business.
Q. What is your vision for SEAGATE?
Our vision is to craft the datasphere. We are committed to helping maximise humanity’s potential by delivering world-class, precision engineered data solutions developed through sustainable and profitable partnerships.
Q. What are the issues you need to address that are related to your industry.
As data intelligence transforms every industry over the next decade, enterprise customers expect infinitely scalable storage systems that are flexible and deliver lower TCO faster. Mass capacity HDDs and systems best address customers’ storage growth and TCO needs. Seagate is addressing the mass capacity storage challenges by leading technology innovation.
With HAMR, we are enabling higher capacity and areal density, and with Multi Actuator Technology, we are addressing performance and capacity needs. Our new MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology has enabled us to set a new hard drive speed record, demonstrating up to 480MB/s sustained throughput— the fastest ever.
The technology has now been deployed in development units — the world’s first dual actuator hard drives — for customer testing prior to productization. Technologies like HAMR and MACH.2 will substantially reduce $/TB and increase power efficiency, helping lower the TCO for our customers.
