Known for enabling new levels of enterprise total cost of ownership (TCO) with HelioSeal helium hard drive technology and industry leading capacity drives, Western Digital Corporation is expanding its portfolio for enterprise customers with a new, mid-range series of 4 terabyte (TB), 6TB and 8TB air-based hard drives.
The new products enable corporate data centers having data set sizes
smaller than found in hyperscale environments to harness the power of
data across a broad spectrum of Big Data applications such as analytics
and distributed file systems.
Western
Digital leads the high-capacity enterprise hard drive market for
hyperscale and cloud environments with its 10TB, 12TB and 14TB drives,
where the company's HelioSeal helium-sealing technology is required for
the highest capacities and densities to deliver the lowest (or best)
TCO. However, many applications have small data sets or benefit from
optimal performance from implementation of a cluster of lower capacity,
air-based hard drives. Many traditional data center systems still rely
on moderate capacity points for RAID-based block-and-file systems.
"The
power of Big Data is driving the need for higher capacities across a
broad spectrum of applications," said Brendan Collins, vice president of
marketing, Devices Business Unit, Western Digital. "Today, mid-range
applications are preparing to move from 1TB and 2TB configurations to
higher capacities. Our new enterprise solutions blend the technology and
TCO leadership of Western Digital's capacity enterprise product line
with a high-density, air-based hard drive design, allowing OEMs to offer
data centers a solution to keep Big Data on-premises, rather
than transition entirely to the cloud."
Distributed
file systems such as Apache Hadoop often have workloads that require
higher access density in order to maintain performance when running Big
Data analytics jobs. The "sweet spot" capacities for these applications
are 4TB, 6TB and 8TB. Western Digital's new enterprise solutions are
designed for this space, while providing enterprise-level performance
and specifications for storage OEM partners to serve end customers with a
range of capacity and price points while maintaining the enterprise
integrity demanded by today's data center architects.
Available
immediately for qualification, the new Ultrastar 7K6, supporting 4TB
and 6TB capacity points, utilizes a new 4-disk, enterprise class,
air-based design. The new products provide up to 12 percent faster
performance than the prior generation Ultrastar 7K6000 and is designed
for traditional storage and server applications as well as distributed
and scalable computing, including block-and-file storage architecture.
Later this quarter, the company will deliver an Ultrastar 7K8 8TB
solution, which is based on an air-based design and is the ninth
generation of the company's 5-disk platform. Further information
regarding the Ultrastar 7K6 and 7K8 is available on the website.
The
4TB, 6TB and 8TB offerings will be ready for volume ramp during the
second calendar quarter of 2018. Western Digital's media cache and
flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) are implemented to improve write
performance. These new enterprise drives will be available in either SAS
or SATA interfaces and provide an enterprise-class MTBF rating of 2M
hours.