2017 — intel
ssd ruler
Creating a brand new form factor with premium and powerful Intel brand image while meeting technical constrains. Inventing fully front serviceable and customizable latch within the tight envelope to improve both ease of insertion and extraction was the main challenge.
Role: Industrial Designer
lead: quinn fitzgerald
client: intel
project: data storage
agency: huge design
Awards:
— Core77 Design Awards 2018 — Commercial Equipment — Notable
— IDEA 2018 — Commercial & Industrial Products — Gold Award
Everything about the "ruler" form factor answers customer needs and has a purpose with an advantage.
Built for data centers. The full system is constructed for data centers and gives customers an SSD with high per-drive, per-server and per-rack capacity. Its new form factor with an intuitive latch provides improved manageability and serviceability in tandem with an efficient thermal design to reduce maintenance costs and completely disrupt the total cost of ownership.
A new form factor. When people think of storage, they think of a flat rectangle about 2.5 to 3.5 inches wide, the right size and shape to accommodate a spinning disk. This new form factor maximizes capacity while fitting into a 1U server rack. A dense drive-to-drive pitch allows 32 SSD Rulers fit into a 1U server rack. This density means data centers can now fit a petabyte of storage onto a single 1U server rack, replacing 24 1U servers.
Design for Manufacturing. Creating an easy to open latch and ensuring an easy access to each single ruler was a key challenge during the design process. Considering all solutions in a fully stacked rack together with the evaluation of functional prototypes helped to drive the concept selection. To achieve the most slender architecture of the ruler itself various manufacturing processes and assembly strategies have been compared.
Visuals: huge design, © Huge Design Llc