HGST Unveils Intelligent, Dynamic Storage Solutions To Transform The Data Center

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Leveraging its data center storage insights, HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), is broadening its scope of innovation to capture new and growing opportunities in data center storage infrastructure. The company today announced six new offerings that will help organizations manage the increasing volume, velocity, variety and longevity of data in today's rapidly evolving data center. In addition to maintaining its longstanding leadership in storage devices, the new offerings demonstrate HGST's commitment to transform the data center and itself through hardware and software solutions that elevate the value it provides to partners and customers. By creating innovative solutions that shape the emerging categories of Flash fabric solutions and active archive solutions, HGST is driving the data center evolution by helping organizations readily extract the information, knowledge and wisdom that lies within their data.

Data Transforms the Storage Industry: Long Live Data™
Data is the currency of the new economy.  In today's digital world, the use of data has transformed from simply recording transactions to using data to gain understanding, drive predictions, make real time decisions and offer new insights – giving businesses the ultimate competitive edge. As this change in use and consumption continues to accelerate, data centers must be optimized to capture or connect to larger amounts of data from new sources, and maintain accessibility to that data over longer periods of time. With the amount of data being created and replicated doubling every two years, storing, retaining, accessing and transforming massive volumes of data has placed storage at the heart of the data center. Storage must be faster, more elastic, more accessible and more affordable, and HGST is delivering those solutions that help the world harness the power of data.  

HGST Extracts Value through "Device Affinity"
Building on its deep expertise in storage devices and technologies, HGST has developed innovative methods to extract increased efficiencies, performance and reliability through advanced software and firmware that provides tight, end-to-end integration of underlying device capabilities with higher level functions at the subsystem, system and application level.  By leveraging this device affinity, solutions can be created with significantly higher value over standalone devices.

• Industry's First Server-Side Clustering and Volume Management Software – Now available, HGST Virident Space™ allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver one or more shared volumes of high performance Flash storage with a total usable capacity of more than 38TB. The High Availability (HA), mirrored cluster is easily configured and managed through an advanced graphical user interface.  HGST Virident Space is ideal for shared storage applications like Oracle® RAC and Red Hat® Global File System that traditionally relied on dedicated SAN storage.  It also provides MySQL™ environments with new levels of availability and efficiency where a single stand-by server can be deployed as an alternative to dedicated replication pairs, saving as much as 37 percent on total server count. By adding HGST Virident Space to the already shipping Virident ClusterCache™ for SAN acceleration, Virident Share™ for Flash pooling and remote access to Flash, and Virident HA™ for replication, HGST is delivering on the vision of a feature-rich and robust Flash fabric solution. HGST Virident Space is currently being tested by hyperscale and data center customers worldwide.
• NVMe-compliant PCIe SSDs with Unmatched Flexibility, Serviceability and Density – HGST's NVMe-compliant Ultrastar® SN100 PCIe SSD series will drive the next wave of server Flash adoption with simplified system integration paired with HGST's renowned quality and reliability. In addition, HGST will be implementing NVMe-compatible extensions aimed at leveraging device affinity by providing tight integration of value-add software that interfaces directly with the PCIe SSD's NAND Flash management. HGST's Ultrastar SN100 NVMe PCIe SSDs will be offered as a HH-HL add-in card, as well as a standard 2.5-inch drive form factor, with industry-leading capacities up to 3.2TB. HGST is currently sampling the Ultrastar SN100 SSD series. Please see the launch press release here: http://www.hgst.com/press-room/press-releases/HGST-announces-NVMe-compliant-PCIe-SSDs.

Setting New Standards in Capacity, TCO: All Future HGST Enterprise Capacity HDDs Will Utilize the HelioSeal Platform
HGST's high-volume air-based platform has been delivering on the promise of high-capacity, high-reliability and performance for decades. However, as the industry continues to push device capacities higher and higher, a transition to helium sealed HDD technology will become essential to achieving these increases while also maintaining reliability. HGST's HelioSeal platform represents proven innovation in high capacity HDD technology and reliability. Already widely adopted by top OEMs and the largest search, social and cloud service providers, the HelioSeal platform will be used for all future HGST capacity enterprise HDDs. As the first and only company to ship hermetically sealed, helium-filled HDDs, HGST provides with its helium platform a long-term path for delivering the highest capacities, while significantly lowering power consumption and cooling, and providing the reliability demanded by data center operators.

• 8TB HDD Now Shipping, Delivering 33 Percent More Capacity and 23 Percent Lower Power^* – HGST's 8TB Ultrastar He8 is the company's second-generation helium-filled HDD. The 8TB Ultrastar He8 extends HGST's leadership in delivering technology and innovation that advances the TCO value proposition for cloud data centers, enterprises, OEMs and system integrators. Outstripping what any HDD vendor can do using air, the Ultrastar He8 enables more efficient data center designs and operations by reducing the physical and carbon footprint of the overall storage systems. Addressing the largest data center challenges, the sealed, helium-filled hard drives enable lower power consumption and higher density storage systems, requiring less rack space. Additionally, the helium-sealed hard drives require less cooling and can be used more reliably in wider operating environments such as ambient data centers. Based on mainstream perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, the Ultrastar He8 can be deployed into any application or environment without tradeoffs in performance or device compatibility. The Ultrastar He8 comes in both 8TB and 6TB capacities. The drives are currently being qualified by leading companies such as Netflix, Huawei, Inspur and Promise Technology as well as other top OEMs and cloud customers around the world. 
• World's First 10TB HDD with the Lowest $/TB and Watt/TB – HGST announces the world's first data center-class 10TB HDD for cloud and cold storage applications. This drive sets unprecedented capacity leadership at the lowest $/TB and watt/TB by harnessing two complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). The additive nature of these two technologies enables the future design platform for HDDs in delivering higher capacity points at accelerated time-to-market entry. It also provides the foundation for all future scaling technologies, putting HGST on an accelerated path to delivering high capacities into existing and future form factor designs. HGST is currently sampling the new 10TB HDDs.
• 6TB Areal Density Leader Now Shipping, Providing the Best $/TB – The Ultrastar 7K6000 is HGST's seventh generation air-based platform, enabling industry leading performance at high capacities (5TB and 6TB) in a standard 3.5-inch HDD design. Now shipping, the 6TB Ultrastar 7K6000 delivers 1.2TB per disk in a five-disk solution. Based on HGST's mature, proven, high reliability platform, the Ultrastar 7K6000 family targets all traditional and rapidly growing scale out storage applications, including object, block and file storage architectures. It's designed to help data center customers capture the growth and long-term value of data by providing huge capacity, best-in-class 7,200 RPM performance and the best $/GB acquisition cost. The drive is currently being qualified by industry-leading cloud and OEM customers worldwide such as Huawei, Sugon and Nimble Storage.

HGST Targets New Greenfield Storage Category: Active Archive
While deep archiving remains a "write once" and hope to "read never" practice, high growth applications and use cases are driving the emergence of new forms of long term data storage. Social media, regulatory compliance and analytics, which demand ongoing random access to historical or long-tail data, are driving new requirements for high capacity data center storage. In addition to massive scalability, these environments require extremely low cost and high efficiency. Traditionally, tape has offered a low cost method for high capacity storage, but fails to provide fast access to random data sets. Mainstream disk-based storage can meet the performance requirements, but has not been able to meet the cost requirements for petabyte scale storage environments.

To address the growing market requirements for active archive solutions, HGST is driving new vectors of innovation to create active archive platforms that satisfy the demands in cost, performance, efficiency and reliability.  This new category of data center storage solution aims to provide a 10x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to traditional enterprise data center solutions and a 5x increase in storage density and power efficiency compared to commonly used scale out cloud data center solutions. Targeting capacities of over 10 petabytes in a single data center rack, HGST's active archive platform leverages industry leading device capacities along with additional points of device affinity that enable enhanced density, performance, efficiency and reliability. By doing so, the company aims to offer the lowest $/TB and Watts/TB in the highest capacity per rack available. Active archive platforms can be configured for a complete range of storage architectures including scale out object storage solutions for public and private cloud data centers.

HGST has begun sample delivery of the active archive platform to strategic partners.  Complete details and specifications will be available in early 2015.

"At every step, we are innovating with purpose and pace to exceed the expectations of our customers by offering the broadest portfolio of SSDs, HDDs, software and solutions in the industry," said Mike Cordano, president of HGST. "By providing complete solutions for both performance and capacity centric environments, we're enabling our data center customers and partners to focus on developing new services and capabilities that drive competitive differentiation and profitability for their businesses. The products and solutions announced today ensure that HGST sustains its heritage as the most trusted provider of innovative data storage offerings to maintain market leadership."

A replay of the live-streamed keynote announcement will be available on September 10 at www.hgst.com/social.

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About HGST
HGST is a wholly owned and independently operated subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC). HGST sets the pace for storage innovation and is helping the world harness the power of data. Building on its reputation for producing reliable HDDs, SSDs, and developing tighter integration with software, HGST is optimizing storage efficiency and reliability for today's data-centric economy. Founded by the creators of the hard drive, HGST serves a broad range of market segments, including enterprise, cloud, OEM, mobile, consumer electronics and personal storage. HGST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit www.hgst.com.  

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to new product offerings, expected demand for certain categories of SSDs and HDDs and availability dates for SSD and HDD products. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including changes in markets, demand, global economic conditions and other risks and uncertainties listed in Western Digital's recent SEC filings, to which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak as of the date hereof, and HGST/WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.

Virident Space, Virident ClusterCache, Virident Share, Virident HA, HelioSeal and Long Live Data are trademarks, and Ultrastar and Virident are registered trademarks of HGST, Inc. and its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. Western Digital, WD, and the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

*Capacity is comparted to current 6TB HDDs. Power is compared to HGST's new Ultrastar 7K6000.

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SOURCE HGST, A Western Digital Company