Western Digital provides cloud market with ULTRASMR HDDs
US data storage company Western Digital has 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.
“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 centres 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 lower Cloud TCO
The new ePMR leverages Western Digital’s OptiNAND technology to unlock new 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 optimising their stacks to take advantage of the benefits of SMR. With cloud service providers increasingly adding SMR to their data centre roadmaps, the 26TB capacity serves as a tipping point to accelerate adoption.
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