Seagate's channel ecosystem continues to grow in numbers with the engagement of partners and distributors network

Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group, and Country Manager for India & SAARC, Seagate Technology 

Seagate’s values are defined by three words: Integrity, Innovation and Inclusion. As the industry leader in data-at-rest protection, Seagate ensures the highest level of encryption possible. Seagate Secure technology is a fundamental evolution in data security with the advent of self-encrypting hard drives that automatically and transparently protect confidential information on all hardware platforms. In a chat with VARINDIA, Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group, and Country Manager for India & SAARC, Seagate Technology points out about the importance of data, how Seagate is deploying NVMe, the company’s focus areas etc.

Importance of managing data
Sameer feels data volumes will continue to increase, and storage solutions need to be adaptable and highly scalable to a world of highly distributed data. The amount of new data created each year is currently growing at a compound annual growth rate of about 26%, according to Seagate’s Rethink Data report. 

He says,” Cloud object storage is a format and data storage architecture that simplifies the storage and management of massive amounts of unstructured data. As more data is collected and stored on the edge, there is a greater need for automated, policy-based management defining where and how that data is stored. This means each organisation must define a variety of locations where data will reside at different moments of its lifecycle, and what services will be performed on any data at a given time. This is often done as part of a composable multicloud strategy in which various applications and services, including storage as a service (StaaS), such as Seagate’s Lyve Cloud. Frictionless StaaS, available at the metro edge, is the new approach to cloud storage with long-term cost predictability that is always-on.``

According to Sameer, standalone backups are being replaced by replication in multiple cloud locations. Replication is a common way to ensure availability and durability, with geographic separation of replicas providing additional protection against local disruptions. Long-term data management models are developing with less concentration on bulk storage for rarely accessed data, and more focus on making data at scale readily accessible — with a goal to help the organization leverage and get the most out of the data it collects.

“Data at scale is no longer limited to private data centres or centralised public clouds, it is becoming ubiquitous. A wide range of data storage options have historically allowed enterprises to diversify their data storage solutions in a hybrid model between data centres and public cloud, but mobile and IoT applications are also driving organisations to keep data and compute resources on the edge and to further diversify where data moves and lives at any given point in its lifecycle,” points out Sameer.

Seagate offering NVMe (Nonvolatile Memory Express)
Talking about the NVMe Sameer comments, “NVMe accelerates SSD performance beyond the limits of legacy bus architectures like SATA and SAS. This protocol uses the PCIe interface and delivers optimizations to lift business-class storage performance to new heights. SMBs and large organizations demand more than fast speeds, and enterprise-grade SSDs integrate several features critical to protecting data integrity, reducing latency and bottlenecks between flash storage and the CPU, while extending drive reliability.

In the gaming world, NVMe catalyses PCIe Gen4 power for unparalleled speed. Seagate’s popular FireCuda SSD line is built on that. FireCuda 530 is the latest and fastest addition to Seagate’s popular line of FireCuda gaming family that redefines speed -up to 7,300 MB/s, with transfer rates 2x faster than PCIe Gen3 and 12x faster than SATA SSDs. This SSD is built for blistering performance and unrivalled endurance, reigning speed, and dominating the SSD lineup. It has the absolute power to make content creation apps run faster and smoother. Video rendering and exporting is lightning-fast; Performance is responsive and purpose-built for sustained use to record, download, rewrite, and repeat.Through NVMe, Seagate has brought its FireCuda SSD series designed to provide with more cores, cache, tech, and I/O.”

Sameer continues, “NVMe goes beyond SSDs --- the NVMe HDD is born. At the recent OCP global summit, Seagate engineers demonstrated the industry’s first native NVMe HDD, showing the viability of NVMe protocol on HDDs. Seagate’s leadership in implementing native NVMe HDD storage devices will help enable delivery of optimized access to data in support of streamlined storage composability. Its deployment will bring considerable benefits including reduced total cost of ownership (TCO); energy savings; streamlined feature development, performance enhancements, and minimized components required for infrastructure solutions; easier and more flexible scaling; the removal of proprietary code; and easing the path to innovation.”

Securing Delicate Enterprise Data
Comprised of talented industry veterans, Seagate has a mature Information Security Management System (ISMS) modeled after IS0 27001. Rigorous controls, strong processes, and comprehensive polices govern the management of data at rest and in flight, resulting in a highly secure, reliable exabyte storage service clearly aligned with the principles of Trust Services Criteria (TSC) security, availability, process integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Seagate’s Lyve Cloud, for instance, has successfully completed its ISO 27001 and SOC2 certifications.

Sameer remarks, “Seagate has also partnered with industry standard and regulatory bodies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to achieve unified standards for media sanitization. System and infrastructure deployments are handled through automated configuration management tools to ensure continued compliance with desired state and hardening standards. In the aspect of transport security, Seagate enforces standard TLS 1.2 with AES-256-GCMto establish secure communications. As an authenticated encryption algorithm, GCM provides proven security of the symmetric-key cryptographic cipher that has wide adoption for its performance.”

To Conclude
In his concluding words Sameer says, “Seagate has long-standing partnerships with a robust supply-chain and a strong network of distributors and partners. Seagate’s supply chain risk management program utilizes a structured framework to effectively evaluate and segment our suppliers, which enables us to prioritize and manage suppliers based on their overall exposure to risk and supply chain disruption. The business continuity plans of suppliers and the key elements of their plans, including risk analysis and business impact, are current and actionable.” 

“Seagate’s focus continues to be on engaging with our partners and distributors network. Our channel ecosystem continues to grow in numbers and reach as we better understand evolving opportunities in the current market scenario and double down on our efforts to engage with our distribution network more closely than ever,” ends Sameer.