Building
on significant technology innovations cultivated over decades, Western
Digital announced that it is sampling its new
industry-leading 22TB and 26TB UltraSMR HDDs to select hyperscale cloud
customers, further expanding its areal density leadership and delivering
customer value by driving TCO lower.
Western
Digital's HDD technology portfolio and areal density leadership puts it
at the center of storage innovation. Leveraging its unique OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PMR (ePMR),
triple-stage actuator (TSA), HelioSeal and now UltraSMR technologies,
Western Digital is on a clear path to delivering 30+ TB with ePMR.
"As
a longstanding partner of the industry's leading cloud providers, we
understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud
infrastructure and invested in several HDD innovations we developed
alongside our areal density technology," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP
and GM, HDD Business Unit, Western Digital. "Our intent with taking
this development strategy was not only to address the capacity demands
of the world's largest cloud titans but to deliver on a roadmap that
would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for
decades to come. With ePMR, OptiNAND and now UltraSMR as the foundation
of Western Digital's HDD roadmap, our cloud customers can continue
rapidly scaling their business by taking advantage of our innovations to
lower their storage TCO."
OptiNAND, UltraSMR and ePMR Drive Cloud TCO Lower
The
new ePMR drives leverage Western Digital's OptiNAND technology to
unlock unprecedented levels of capacity, performance and data
resiliency. The 22TB CMR HDD incorporates OptiNAND to deliver
areal-density leadership on a mature 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform
with ten disks.
Combining
OptiNAND with proprietary firmware that leverages HDD system-level
hardware advancements, Western Digital's new UltraSMR technology
introduces large block encoding along with an advanced error correction
algorithm that increases tracks-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher
capacity. The result is Western Digital's new 26TB Ultrastar® DC HC670
UltraSMR HDD that delivers 2.6TB per platter, offering 18% more capacity
for cloud customers optimizing their stacks to take advantage of the
benefits of SMR. With cloud service providers increasingly adding SMR to
their datacenter roadmaps, the 26TB capacity serves as a tipping point
to accelerate adoption.
Uniquely
capable with OptiNAND, the HDDs also include the ArmorCache write
cache data safety feature, which gives customers the performance of
write cache enable (WCE) combined with the data protection of write
cache disable (WCD) for added data protection or resiliency in case of
an emergency power off (EPO). For the first time in HDD history, this
Write Cache Data Safety feature gives users both performance and data
protection, no matter which mode is selected. OptiNAND gives the drives a
significant performance increase also in WCD mode, which is greatest in
random writes with larger block transfers. At common HDD application
transfer lengths of 256KB or greater, IOPS and throughput improve by
more than 40% relative to a non-OptiNAND drives, with a peak improvement
of over 80% at 1MB transfer length.
22TB CMR and 26TB UltraSMR HDD Availability:
- The
22TB Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD and the new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670
UltraSMR HDD are now sampling to select hyperscale customers. The DC
HC570 HDD will begin volume shipments to the channel, and the UltraSMR
HDD will begin shipping to select customers in the summer of 2022.
- The Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs
will feature the new 22TB CMR Ultrastar HDDs this summer, delivering
the industry's highest storage density in a fully optimized platform for
added durability and data reliability for software-defined storage.
- Extending OptiNAND innovations across its HDD portfolio, Western Digital will deliver 22TB WD Purple Pro HDDs for smart video/surveillance, WD Red Pro HDDs for NAS solutions, and WD Gold HDDs for system integrators and resellers serving enterprises and SMBs. These drives will be available this summer.