Western Digital is offering its new 22TB and 26TB UltraSMR hard disk drives (HDDs) to select hyperscale cloud customers. The company says that is on a clear path to delivering 30-plus terabytes (TB) with energy-assisted PMR (ePMR).
Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, EVP and GM, HDD Business Unit, Western Digital, said: “As a longstanding partner of the industry’s leading cloud providers, we understand their unique requirements in building next-generation cloud infrastructure and invested in several HDD innovations we developed alongside our areal density technology. Our intent with taking this development strategy was not only to address the capacity demands of the world’s largest cloud titans but to deliver on a roadmap that would also support the evolving economics of their data centers for decades to come. With ePMR, the architecture OptiNAND and now UltraSMR as the foundation of Western Digital’s HDD roadmap, cloud customers can continue rapidly scaling their business, by lowering their storage TCO (total cost of ownership), Ashley Gorakhpurwalla added.
The 22TB CMR drive has OptiNAND to deliver areal-density leadership on a mature 2.2TB/platter HelioSeal platform with ten disks.
Combining OptiNAND with proprietary firmware that uses HDD system-level hardware , WD’s new UltraSMR introduces large block encoding along with an error correction algorithm that increases tracks-per-inch (TPI) to enable higher capacity. The result is the new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR HDD that delivers 2.6TB per platter, offering 18 per cent more capacity for cloud customers.
The drives also include the ArmorCache write cache data safety feature, for added data protection or resiliency in case of an emergency power off (EPO).
