Data Centre Storage Trends for 2024

By Uwe Kemmer, director EMEA field engineering at Western Digital Corp.

As we look forward into the new year, one trend around data and storage stands out: organisations and data centre managers across Europe will continue to be under pressure to minimize their environmental impact and find ways to meet their sustainability goals.

For data-driven industries that create and store vast volumes of information, this is a significant challenge. Data centres already represent 1 to 1.5% of the world’s electricity use, as they require high levels of power consumption to function and, crucially, to cool down their operations. As we continue to generate more data, especially through the increasing adoption of technology innovations such as AI and ML, processing and storage requirements will only further increase.

An example for this is the explosive growth of the AI server market, which is forecasted to reach a staggering size of $150 billion by 2027. Translated into energy consumption this market segment could use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours annually.

As a response to this challenge, we can expect to see organisations turn to solutions that help them prioritize energy efficiency and reduce waste. More sustainable hardware such as high-capacity HDDs can help organisations design and operate a data centre with a lower environmental impact.

The new generation of highest capacity drives that utilize SMR are a step forward in meeting data centre customers’ sustainability targets. SMR HDDs provide up to an additional 15%+ increase in areal density, compared to highest capacity drives using CMR technology. An example of a recently launched high capacity SMR HDD is Western Digital’s 28TB Ultrastar DC HC680 drive that is not only built with 40% (by weight) recycled content, but is also 10% more energy efficient per terabyte¹, contributing to customers’ data centre infrastructure power efficiency goals at scale.

Another benefit of using higher capacity drives is that data centre customers can install a smaller quantity of low power, higher-capacity HDDs rather than a higher quantity of smaller-capacity HDDs to store the same amount of data, which helps them reduce power and cooling costs. To avoid unnecessary e-waste, certain old or end-of-life HDD models can be taken to Easy Recycle schemes, where saveable materials can be repurposed, creating more sustainable, energy efficient supply chains.

By turning to innovative storage solutions, organisations will be able to process and analyse more data in 2024 but do so in a way which is more sustainable, and which helps them meet their reduced energy usage targets.

¹ 1TB is equal to one trillion bytes.  Actual user capacity may be less due to operating environment. The 28TB Ultrastar DC HC680 SMR HDD offers 10% less Watt/TB at idle and for a random read 4KB QD=8 workload compared to the company’s previous gen 26TB SMR HDD. The 24TB Ultrastar DC HC580 and WD Gold CMR HDDs provide 12% less Watt/TB at idle and for random 50/50 read/write, 4KB QD=4 workloads compared to the company’s previous gen 22TB HDDs