A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage and one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data even when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.
Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data lifecycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and entertainment companies, government agencies, big data companies, and life science organizations. Quantum headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices around the world, supporting customers globally in addition to working with a global network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers.
Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster. Lustre file system software is available under the GNU General Public License and provides high performance file systems for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site systems. Since June 2005, Lustre has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, and more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, including the world's No. 1 ranked TOP500 supercomputer in June 2020, Fugaku, as well as previous top supercomputers such as Titan and Sequoia.
sTec is an American computer data storage technology company headquartered in California, with research and development, sales, support or manufacturing sites in China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Silicon Valley (USA), and Taiwan.
Fusion-io, Inc. was a computer hardware and software systems company based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, that designed and manufactured products using flash memory technology. The Fusion ioMemory was marketed for applications such as databases, virtualization, cloud computing, big data. Their ioDrive product was considered around 2011 to be one of the fastest storage devices on the market.
A hybrid array is a form of hierarchical storage management that combines hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs) for I/O speed improvements.
Pure Storage is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its products in stealth mode until 2011. Afterwards, the company grew in revenues by about 50% per quarter and raised more than $470 million in venture capital funding, before going public in 2015. Initially, Pure Storage developed the software for storage controllers and used generic flash storage hardware. Pure Storage finished developing its own proprietary flash storage hardware in 2015.
Blue Whale Clustered file system (BWFS) is a shared disk file system made by Tianjin Zhongke Blue Whale Information Technologies Company in China.
Violin Systems is a private American company based in Silicon Valley, California, that designs and manufactures computer data storage products.
Nimble Storage, founded in 2008, produced hardware and software products for data storage, specifically data storage arrays that use the iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols and includes data backup and data protection features. Nimble is now a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Tintri, Inc. is a division of DataDirect Networks based in Santa Clara, California. Tintri provides products designed for businesses cloud computing, virtual machines (VMs), and containers. The core product line is the VMstore, a storage system and software designed to simplify management in data center and cloud environments. After becoming a public company in 2017, within a year it ran out of cash and was acquired in bankruptcy.
GreenBytes was an American company providing inline deduplication data storage appliances and cloud-scale IO-Offload systems. Robert Petrocelli founded the company in 2007. On May 15, 2014, it was acquired by Oracle Corporation.
Nimbus Data is an American computer data storage software and systems company.
PernixData was a software company based in San Jose, California. PernixData was founded in 2012, and acquired in 2016. Its main product is PernixData FVP, which is software for virtualizing server-side flash memory and random-access memory (RAM).
Nexenta Systems, Inc. is a company that markets computer software for data storage and backup, headquartered in San Jose, California. Nexenta develops the products NexentaStor, NexentaCloud, NexentaFusion, and NexentaEdge.
Scality is a company based in San Francisco, California that develops software-defined object storage. RING is the company's commercial product. Scality RING software deploys on industry-standard servers to store objects and files. Scality also offers a number of open source tools called Zenko, including Zenko CloudServer, compatible with the Amazon S3 interface.
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a privately-held data storage company, and is headquartered in Chatsworth, California, USA.
ZFS combines a file system with a volume manager. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris – including ZFS – were published under an open source license as OpenSolaris for around 5 years from 2005, before being placed under a closed source license when Oracle Corporation acquired Sun in 2009/2010. During 2005 to 2010, the open source version of ZFS was ported to Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. In 2010, the illumos project forked a recent version of OpenSolaris, to continue its development as an open source project, including ZFS. In 2013, OpenZFS was founded to coordinate the development of open source ZFS. OpenZFS maintains and manages the core ZFS code, while organizations using ZFS maintain the specific code and validation processes required for ZFS to integrate within their systems. OpenZFS is widely used in Unix-like systems.
