Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for virtual environments (Part III) from form factor to power

In part II of this series we covered some of the differences between various Hard Disk Drive (HDD) including looking beyond the covers at availability, cache and cost. Let us pick up where we left off on our look beyond the covers to help answer the question of which is the best HDD to use.

Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for virtual environments (Part I)

Unless you are one of the few who have gone all solid-state devices (SSDs) for your virtual environment, hard disk drives (HHDs) still have a role. That role might be for primary storage of your VMs and/or their data, or as a destination target for backups, snapshots, archiving or as a work and scratch area. Or perhaps you have some HDDs as part of a virtual storage appliance (VSA), storage virtualization, virtual storage or storage hypervisor configuration. Even if you have gone all SSD for your primary storage, you might be using disk as a target for backups complimenting or replacing tape and clouds. On the other hand, maybe you have a mix of HDD and SSD for production, what are you doing with your test, development or lab systems, both at work and at home.

Self Encrypting Disks (SEDs)

The next true IT industry revolutionary product will be software, virtualization and cloud technology that does not require underlying physical hardware resources (servers, network and disk storage). While we wait for that revolutionary technology to appear outside of marketing or computer generated animations, there remains the need to protect cloud and virtual environments and their underling disk storage. Underlying disk storage includes among others solid state device (SSD) as well hard disk drive (HDD) and Removable Hard Disk Drive (RHDD) packaged in different types of solutions accessed via shared SAS, iSCSI, FC, FCoE or NAS.