Western Digital Expand Mid-Range Series 3.5-Inches Air-Based HDDs

Known for enabling new levels of enterprise TCO with HelioSeal helium HDD technology and industry capacity drives, Western Digital Corporation (WDC) is expanding its portfolio for enterprise customers with a mid-range series of  4, 6 and 8TB air-based HDDs.

This products enable corporate data centers having data set sizes smaller than found in hyperscale environments to harness the power of data across a spectrum of big data applications such as analytics and distributed file systems.

The company leads the high-capacity enterprise HDD market for hyperscale and cloud environments with its 10, 12 and 14TB drives, where the firm’s HelioSeal helium-sealing technology is required for the highest capacities and densities to deliver TCO. However, many applications have small data sets or benefit from optimal performance from implementation of a cluster of lower capacity, air-based HDDs. Many traditional data center systems still rely on moderate capacity points for RAID-based block-and-file systems.

“The power of big data is driving the need for higher capacities across a broad spectrum of applications,” said Brendan Collins, VP marketing, devices business unit, Western Digital. “Today, mid-range applications are preparing to move from 1TB and 2TB configurations to higher capacities. Our new enterprise solutions blend the technology and TCO leadership of Western Digital’s capacity enterprise product line with a high-density, air-based HDD design, allowing OEMs to offer data centers a solution to keep big data on-premises, rather than transition entirely to the cloud.”

Distributed file systems such as Apache Hadoop often have workloads that require higher access density in order to maintain performance when running big data analytics jobs. The ‘sweet spot’ capacities for these applications are 4, 6 and 8TB. The company’s enterprise solutions are designed for this space, while providing enterprise performance and specifications for storage OEM partners to serve end customers with a range of capacity and price points while maintaining the enterprise integrity demanded by today’s data center architects.

Available for qualification, the Ultrastar 7K6, supporting 4 and 6TB capacity points, utilizes a 4-disk, enterprise, air-based design. These products provide up to 12% faster performance than the prior generation Ultrastar 7K6000 and is designed for traditional storage and server applications as well as distributed and scalable computing, including block-and-file storage architecture. Later this quarter, the company will deliver an Ultrastar 7K8 8TB solution, which is based on an air-based design and is the ninth generation of the firm’s five-disk platform.

The 4, 6 and 8TB offerings will be ready for volume ramp during 2CQ18.

The company’s media cache and flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) are implemented to improve write performance. These enterprise drives will be available in either SAS or SATA interfaces and provide an enterprise MTBF rating of 2 million hours.