Latest news with #UltraSMR
Techday NZ
16-07-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Optimising TCO for data-intensive technologies and applications
The pace of digital transformation and artificial intelligence has triggered an unprecedented surge in data generation. In response, data storage has become a vital cornerstone of modern infrastructure - essential to keeping up with this rapid evolution. Organisations of all sizes are feeling the pressure, but the impact is especially profound on hyperscale enterprises, including the world's largest search, social media, entertainment, and eCommerce platforms. For these businesses, scaling storage infrastructure efficiently, cost-effectively, and sustainably is key to long-term success. In Australia, hyperscalers and colocation providers are accelerating large-scale investments driven by growing AI and cloud demand to establish high performance and high-capacity computing infrastructure. The Australian data centre market was valued at US$6.81 billion in 2024, and is projected to reach US$8.58 billion by 2030 - reinforcing the country's potential for growth. With growing volumes of data, use cases and applications in the cloud and on-premises, data centre managers are also constantly under pressure to provide unwavering reliability and Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance at the lowest possible cost. Lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) influences almost every decision they make. And achieving the lowest possible TCO is money saved, which drives revenue and fuels additional services. HDD innovations redefine cost efficiency TCO is complex; it is strategic, and it is long-term. Reducing TCO also involves numerous factors. The cost of a drive or the price per terabyte (TB) is important, but this is just one of several considerations that go into a compound equation that can help lower TCO. Other factors can include the amount of floor space, the cost of power and cooling, and maintenance and repairs, just to name a few. The pressure to cut TCO is influencing data centres to increasingly rely on storage solutions that offer high-capacity, low power, performance and proven reliability in a cost-effective design. In fact, HDD innovation continues to be the backbone for data-heavy technologies and applications to thrive. Today, most of the world's stored data resides on HDDs and there is simply no substitute that can deliver the same TCO value at scale for data centres - not flash, not tape. For data centre architects, moving to the highest capacity HDDs quickly means scaling efficiently without increasing the physical footprint while reducing watts/TB, power and cooling costs. HDDs today are designed to hold more data within the same 3.5-inch footprint, scaling for exponential growth while reducing TCO. Innovations like helium-sealed drives, OptiNAND technology, UltraSMR, and energy-assisted technologies have enhanced capacity, performance, reliability, and power efficiency of today's massive-capacity HDDs. For example, replacing 24TB HDDs with higher capacity drives to deploy 2PB of storage can reduce server count by 25%, cut energy consumption per terabyte by 20%, and lower infrastructure and maintenance costs. These gains reduce physical space requirements and operational expenses while maintaining storage performance, helping businesses optimise their storage density and costs. Innovation push More data equals more value especially for AI, and businesses would store more data if they could do so in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Moving to the highest capacity HDDs can help. High-capacity HDDs will continue to play a key role in all of this and are the most economical media to store massive amounts of data online and at scale. The benefits translate into overall data centre power and cooling savings, which can play an important role in helping data centres operate greener.
Channel Post MEA
14-02-2025
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Western Digital Unveils Go-Forward Strategy At Investor Day 2025
Western Digital held the company's Investor Day, announcing a vision and strategy for the future as the planned separation of the company's Flash business nears its expected completion on February 21, 2025. CEO Designate Irving Tan reinforced Western Digital's leadership in delivering world-class, sustainable storage solutions at scale. With a deep legacy in HDD technology and innovation, Western Digital remains the trusted partner for the world's largest hyperscalers, CSPs and OEMs, delivering cutting-edge solutions at the right time with low total cost of ownership (TCO). From industry-leading ePMR CMR HDDs and UltraSMR technology, to HAMR and beyond, Western Digital continues to drive innovation across its portfolio, creating unmatched long-term value for its customers. Tan shared Western Digital's projection on how the proliferation of AI will impact the HDD industry and the value of data stored. As companies generate and store more data, growing use cases such as text-to-image GenAI workloads, text-to-video applications and a rising demand for massive data lakes to fuel AI models are expected to increase HDD exabyte shipments at a 23% CAGR from 2024 to 20281. Western Digital remains steadfast in addressing the ever-growing data demands of the cloud and enterprise markets, delivering the scalability, TCO and sustainability needed to store the majority of the world's generated data, which is expected to grow 3x between 2023 and 20282. To meet this demand today and into the future, Tan announced that the company's HAMR development is accelerating as testing is underway with two major hyperscale customers. With the company's differentiated portfolio of scalable capacity across ePMR and UltraSMR technologies, and with UltraSMR gains extending to HAMR, Western Digital is enabling its customers to plan long-term while leveraging expanding capacity points available today. This helps ensure a predictable, scalable economic transition for customers while achieving maximum value as their data center environments evolve. 'The future holds tremendous opportunity, and Western Digital is well-positioned to be the leader in data storage as we meet our customers' storage needs today and into the future,' said Tan. 'We are not just advancing the future of HDD—we're unleashing the power and value of data for enterprise and cloud customers worldwide.' The company's new strategic approach underscores Western Digital's dedication to meeting customer demands today while positioning for future growth. In support, Tan shared that the team's expertise and intellectual property across physics, material sciences and manufacturing capability is being applied to exploring new growth opportunities in areas such as servo-mechanics, magnetics and systems design.
