As the amount of data created daily continues a parabolic rise, success in business can heavily rely on the ability to access data and extract insights for future innovation, product design, financial decisions, and other equally essential functions.
The ability to unlock potential through data is the core of Western Digital’s own innovation, as exemplified by an event titled What’s Next Western Digital, taking place today in San Francisco. During the event’s keynote, Western Digital executives announced new HDD and flash memory products designed to support massive growth and scale at the cloud level and help customers realize their potential.
The new HDDs — the 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD and the 22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD — are now the highest capacity drives available. Both are built on decades of innovative technology and developed to help cloud providers and hyperscale customers meet modern data demands.
“Everything we do starts with the belief in human potential as it intersects digital innovation, and in turn, creates possibility,” Western Digital CEO David Goeckeler said in a comment prior to the event. “This possibility is fueled by a technology platform that the world’s innovators are building on and enabling the best new experiences — intelligent devices, powered by the cloud, connected by high-performance networks. We have only scratched the surface on the value of data and the technologies that unlock it.”
But to fully realize that value, businesses must first extract strategic insights from a massive amount of data to fuel future success. Thus, the need to store, transmit, process, and analyze data grows more important than ever. Every bit stored can play a role in the cost to build, run, and scale a company’s operations.
This intersection is precisely where Western Digital is working to make significant technological advances for its customers. And on display is the full power of the company’s innovation in flash memory and HDD storage to do it.
New drives to drive scale
At What’s Next Western Digital, Executive Vice President and GM of the HDD business unit, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, outlined Western Digital’s plan to address surging capacity demands by advancing HDD capacity and keeping TCO competitively low. The new 22TB and 26TB SMR drives, Gorakhpurwalla says, lead the industry in areal density and TCO.
“The economics of storing a bit matter more now than ever,” Gorakhpurwalla said in an interview. “What’s different now is the matter of scale. What used to be petabytes is now at zettabyte scale, and that changes everything. If you’re dealing with a million, two million, or 10 million of anything, that’s a huge multiplier.”
Since factors like capacity, TCO, energy use, sustainability, and others that affect data center operations and DCIM matter now more than ever. The key for Western Digital then is delivering products and capabilities that can scale to such a level and help its customers scale and innovate to new levels.
Western Digital’s new 26TB Ultrastar HDD delivers 2.6TB per platter, providing an 18% increase in capacity compared to conventional recording capacities. It’s an industry first and an important step in delivering high-capacity, energy-assisted drives to the broader market.
The new drives announced today also represent a culmination of innovations that make the capacity levels possible. Western Digital has been developing these technological advances for decades. Namely, they are ePMR, HelioSeal, OptiNAND, and UltraSMR — a new, denser form of SMR technology.
It’s a powerful combination of technology and innovation that will allow cloud scale customers to increase capacities and performance, in addition to keeping TCO manageable.
An 18% increase in capacity could lead to a substantial reduction in TCO and operating costs.
“It’s fewer CPUs, network switches, UPS devices, environmental conditioning, and so on,” Gorakhpurwalla said. “But more than that, with our roadmap of innovation the returns on these increases are immediate. There’s no waiting three years for these improvements to pay off.”
Innovation for specialization
For Rob Soderbery, EVP and GM of the flash business unit, the products being announced at What’s Next Western Digital represent an impressive execution of the company’s strategy for flash memory and its innovation in BiCS NAND.
A year ago, nearly to the day, Soderbery took the stage at a different Western Digital event that laid out the company’s flash technology roadmap. In it, Soderbery gave perspective on the company’s work in flash innovation that would develop the next generation of purpose-built products, engineered with the end users in mind. They would deliver speed, capacity, endurance, form factor, power requirements, and environmental stability in ways that make sense for their individual use.
With the new Ultrastar DC SN650 NVMe — a 16TB, BiCS 5, PCIe Gen 4 enterprise-grade SSD — announced at What’s Next Western Digital, Soderbery says the flash business has made good on its promises.
This viewpoint of addressing the holistic needs of customers extends to how hyperscalers and cloud providers are evolving. As the cloud market continues to expand, providers need more nuanced infrastructure to serve specific needs.
“The trend we’re seeing in the cloud is increasing specialization,” Soderbery said. “Cloud vendors compete and win by better serving workloads, whether it be compute, AI and ML, web workloads, social media, and others. Hyperscalers realize that there is room for tremendous specialization. So, a lot of what we’re doing today in innovation is thinking about how we can optimize SSDs as part of the entire system.”
Partnership as a value proposition
In addition to specializing product offerings for specific purposes like cloud, OEM, gaming, automotive, and many other verticals, both Gorakhpurwalla and Soderbery pointed out that one of a cloud providers’ most significant needs is to have a strategic partner when planning for the future.
“As you go into the cloud space, many customers are large enough in scale and sophisticated enough in capability that they are not necessarily asking for commoditization,” Gorakhpurwalla said, “but they have the volume to support specialization. That unique capability they’re asking for is the exact opposite of commoditization. It means we are engineering and innovating in partnership with our customers in a way that is specific to their needs.”
As an example, Gorakhpurwalla pointed to the growing need from some cloud customers to have a storage option between hard drives and cold archive storage like tape. While it is a deeper archive option than the fast-performing Ultrastar hard drives or eSSDs, some are looking for a trade-off of performance to store data at a more economical level.
For Soderbery, a strategic partnership with Western Digital is a way to bring customers into the roadmap process and provide confidence that product innovation will be there when needed.
“One of the unique things we bring to the relationship in that hyperscale value proposition is the way we partner,” Soderbery said. “What does being a strategic partner mean? It means things like a long-term roadmap interlock. We routinely plan two to three years out with these customers. There’s a long-term reputational trust and reliability that we have with our hyperscale customers. On balance, they like our propositional offer and the way we conduct business.”
Looking forward
While capacity gains are an immediate win, Gorakhpurwalla also pointed out the importance of the product roadmap.
Western Digital is confident that it can soon produce hard drives at a 30+TB capacity level without needing to introduce entirely new technologies like HAMR. While HAMR is still on the horizon, Gorakhpurwalla said, the collection of innovative technologies pushing drives to 26TB today will continue to push the boundaries of storage further for years to come.
For more information on the products announced during What’s Next Western Digital, visit the Western Digital newsroom.
You can also view a replay of the live webcast from What’s Next Western Digital here.
