WD/HGST Expands Data Center Storage Family With ActiveScale P100

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) announced an entry-level storage system focused on addressing cloud-scale challenges.

ActiveScale P100

Expanding its existing systems, solutions and platforms portfolio, the plug-and-play object storage system, the ActiveScale P100 system provides the foundation for the future of petabyte scale storage infrastructure. It is the company’s latest integrated storage system, which disrupts the economics of scaling capacity into petabytes, and enables the creation of massive storage repositories across both on-premise and hosted cloud architectures.

ActiveScale P100 storage system
The ActiveScale P100 joins the Data Center System (DCS) business unit’s portfolio that also includes the Active Archive System, the InfiniFlash all-flash storage platform, and the disk-based platforms. It is an economic entry-level configuration that scales from 720TB to 19PB of raw capacity to meet application data growth needs in increments of easy-to-install capacities. It’s an extensible, integrated architecture that utilizes an Amazon S3 interface for object storage. The system is for high-capacity demanding markets, including on-premise and off-premise cloud, life sciences, government/defense, and media and entertainment industry applications. The ActiveScale system addresses both capacity and performance challenges for data-intensive workloads, such as large content repositories, media streaming and media services, data analytics, data protection and archiving.

ActiveScale CM (cloud management) screenshot
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Included in the ActiveScale P100, and available for current HGST Active Archive System customers, is ActiveScale CM (cloud management), a cloud-based system monitoring tool that allows customers to simply and effectively manage their systems. It is provided at no additional cost. ActiveScale CM provides remote system health monitoring and predictive capacity and performance analytics to proactively manage the storage and access to petabyte-scale data, subsequently reducing IT and administrative costs.

“Object storage is a key technology that has enabled hyperscalers to build cloud-scale infrastructure,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “We believe that the ActiveScale P100 system will enable strong consistency at cloud-scale, and enables enterprises to achieve new levels of scale and flexibility far easier and at a much better cost point than traditional storage.”

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List pricing for the ActiveScale P100 system starts at $0.22 per gigabyte and is available for order.

“The nice thing about the Active Archive System is that it plugs directly into the Versity Storage Manager without any special modifications,” said Bo Kennedy, director, architecture, Ovation Data, Inc. “We don’t have to change our workflow at all. In fact, the Active Archive System enhances our workflow. Object storage provides both economic and performance advantages but the challenge to any system is scaling efficiently. We look forward to seeing ActiveScale’s solution to this challenge.“

“The storage industry is facing a wave of transformation, stemming from cloud architectures, software-defined storage, the convergence of compute, and the growing adoption of flash,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage practice, IDC. “As enterprises and service providers alike evolve their infrastructures to incorporate these new technologies, they will look to enterprise providers like Western Digital that bring specific expertise in integrating them into next-generation platform offerings.”

“We have integrated the fundamental building blocks of storage to create solutions for the market that will help customers extract greater value from increasing volumes of data,” said Dave Tang, SVP and GM, data center systems business unit, Western Digital. “The capacity and value delivered by the ActiveScale P100 makes cloud-scale repositories and big data analytics economically feasible and accessible to virtually every application and industry. With our entire product portfolio, we’re changing how enterprises and cloud service providers deploy, scale and manage cloud-scale data centers. Our turnkey systems enable businesses to shift their focus from building infrastructure to harnessing the power of data for their customers or organizations.”

Partnering with DCS business unit
Through the Enterprise Partner Program, the DCS business unit works closely with solution providers to deliver new levels of service to customers. The unit is integrating, tuning and optimizing key technologies at the component, firmware, software, platforms and system levels to create a portfolio that enables partners to address big data and fast data challenges. Additionally, the program brings together application ISVs in conjunction with solutions providers to develop complete solutions that achieve a total customer experience. The ActiveScale P100 enables solution providers to easily install solutions and optimize customer workloads to capture, store, manage, retain and deliver data for their customers.

The DCS business unit also provides professional StorChoice deployment services to help install and implement the ActiveScale P100 and train solutions providers or company staff to meet evolving business requirements.

Resources:
ActiveScale P100 data sheet
Whitepaper from Enterprise Management Associates titled HGST Maximizes Savings With Object Storage Management Suite
Register for webinar on how to better manage 50% data growth.
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