Tailoring solutions to the Australian market

Silicon Memory Technologies (SMT) is a data storage specialist which designs and implements storage solutions to its customer base of systems integrators (SIs) and resellers. It entered the industry in 1996 as a memory manufacturer and progressed to focus on the storage market.

SMT has worked with Seagate for more than 10 years and is an authorized Seagate Premier Partner. It initially partnered with the American storage vendor for its high performance 2.5- and 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs).

According to technical sales manager, Alf Nguyen, SMT’s partnership with Seagate is underpinned by the vendor’s understanding of the local technical support requirements of a SI, incorporating both the value-added reseller and its channel.

“Supplying solutions to channel sectors like media and broadcast relies on a great deal of back-end support as the systems deployed are often for mission critical applications,” Nguyen said.”

SMT works with Seagate throughout the region with senior field applications engineer, Sam Zavaglia and his team. It uses Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity (formerly Constellation ES), Enterprise Value (formerly Constellation CS), and NAS HDD drives which are fitted into chassis from other manufacturers.

The most recently-released NAS HDD is deployed in several one to five-bay systems, with customers spanning across home users, small offices, and medium-sized businesses.

SMT packages the unit as part of its small NAS solutions to give customers a flexible storage product.

Flexible and powerful applications are key

“The Seagate NAS HDD packaged in our NAS server solutions offers the client flexible and powerful applications that have not been packaged in a low-cost data storage device before,” Nguyen said. “Traditionally, thousands of dollars would be spent to achieve what a small five-bay NAS server can now do with the affordable NAS HDDs.”

Available in 2TB, 3TB and 4TB capacities, the NAS HDD can support up to 20TB of storage within a five-bay NAS solution. Seagate claims the 2TB model is capable of a sustained data rate of 159MBps, while the 3TB and 4TB variants reach 180MBps. The drive operates on a SATA 6Gbps interface and has a 64MB cache. It is also backed by the vendor’s five years warranty.

The NAS HDD’s key differentiator is Seagate’s NASWorks technology which sets it apart from other desktop HDDs. The feature fine-tunes drive performance to better align it with NAS systems, delivering: extended error recovery controls; minimised vibration; advanced power profiles.

The Enterprise Capacity on the other hand is an enterprise-class SATA drive for high demand loads.

It is designed for business storage and high-end systems, and preferred by SMT for 24x7 requirements based on ‘performance versus price’ metrics.

The Enterprise Capacity is suitable for high-capacity RAID, external arrays, bulk Cloud data, enterprise backup and restore, and centralised surveillance scenarios.

While it is applicable to most verticals, Nguyen said the Enterprise Capacity has allowed SMT to tap into the broadcast and media production industries, and, more recently, surveillance where its Seagate-based systems are utilised as network video recorder (NVR) storage.

The capacity-optimised Enterprise Value is for bulk Cloud storage servers and arrays, alongside direct-attached storage (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS) application.

SMT places these into systems which may not be 24x7, but are of large capacity, but not always mission-critical.