Mark Grace, Western Digital | Western Digital the Next Decade of Big Data 2017
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2017-10-11

Mark Grace, Senior VP, Devices sits down with Jeff Frick at Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data, Western Digital World HQ in San Jose, CA

#LetDataThrive #theCUBE 

https://siliconangle.com/2017/10/16/hot-storage-technology-gets-a-cool-down-from-western-digital-letdatathrive/

Expanded 40 terabyte drives and 100x improvement
This month’s announcements from Western Digital are significant in the storage capacity and resiliency that MAMR technology will provide when it becomes generally available in 2019. MAMR will allow Western Digital to offer hard drives with at least 40 terabytes of capacity and 2.5 million hours of reliability, a data-writing lifetime that is 100 times better than HAMR.

“We’ve plotted a course now that was relatively uncertain for the hard drive industry and the data center,” Grace said. “We can speak clearly now to the market and clearly to customers about the value proposition for rotating magnetic storage for decades to come.”

Although Western Digital had also invested in HAMR, the company was motivated to pursue a different solution because of an accelerating shift in the industry. When PMR technology entered the market, nearly 60 percent of the storage need was being driven by the personal computer industry. Now the model has completely flipped, with enterprise data centers holding a 60 percent share and growing, according to IDC’s Rydning.

Data centers are muscling up, and there is a strong need to increase storage capacity per cubic meter inside the operational infrastructure. “The demand for storage capacity by these large data centers is just phenomenal,” Rydning said.