WD®, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company and world leader in storage deployed for modern datacenters,  today announced its innovative  WD Ae™ line of hard drives designed  for the unique operating characteristics of the emerging archive tier within  web-scale datacenters. Built on a platform to achieve optimal total cost of ownership  (TCO), WD Ae hard drives utilize the lowest possible power consumption and a Progressive  Capacity™ model to enable a new tier of storage for large-scale cloud  infrastructures. 

  “Modern datacenter customers came to us  with a need for an HDD solution designed specifically for ever-expanding cold-data  repositories,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, storage  technology, WD. “Now in our third generation with over
700 petabytes deployed,  WD is bringing the WD Ae drive to the broader market, representing another  vital component of WD’s capacity storage portfolio, which delivers features and  product attributes optimized for the rapidly evolving storage market.” 

  The expanding scale of  data creation and the corresponding need to retain, preserve and extract value  from that data creates a new and unique challenge for large-scale datacenter  entities.  Reliable, long-term data management for  massive-scale data storage is becoming ever more critical.  The conventional tools and technologies for  cost-effective storage are not effective in massive-scale datacenters, so  entirely new approaches to storage architectures and associated component  technology are emerging. 

  “Cloud service providers have rapidly  growing volumes of generally inactive data to store and manage, while at the  same providing customers with access to the data at almost any time,” according  to John Rydning, IDC’s vice president for hard disk drive research.  “WD’s
new WD Ae line of HDDs is aimed directly at these storage use cases, and is  helping to define a new, active archive enterprise storage sub-segment, thus  opening new HDD storage opportunities for the HDD industry.” 

  Focusing on the unique attributes of cold  data, WD has led the cold/archive market with multiple generations of archive  storage, actively evolving a product formula to  deliver the optimal combination of cost-effectiveness, power efficiency, storage  density and application intensity. WD Ae drives are purpose-built archive HDDs with  extreme areal density on a high volume mechanical platform that offers increased  power efficiency and a Progressive Capacity model. 

  Part of the unique  attributes of the WD Ae hard drive family includes: a dense five-platter platform,  which renders an optimal mix of power, performance, capacity and cost; capacities  greater than 6 TB; SATA 6 Gb/s interface; and a workload and reliability rating  of 60
TB/yr workload and 500 Khrs Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF).   

 WD Ae Progressive Capacity

As technology and  manufacturing processes mature over time, incremental capacity increases are  realized. WD’s innovative Progressive Capacity model allows distribution of  these incrementally higher capacity models to take advantage of their fullest available  capacity: 6.1 TB, 6.2 TB, or 6.3 TB, for instance. These more granular capacity  increments result in far greater capacity attainment through the life of a  product platform. At the massive scale of modern applications, the availability  of incremental capacity each quarter renders exceptional value to datacenters  who can realize improvements in capacity-per-drive, capacity-per-volumetric  space and reduced infrastructure overhead.

Hot vs. Cold Data Storage - the Data Storage Temperature Continuum

While  approximately 20-30 percent of data on most networks is active, commonly  referred to as “hot,” the majority of data, 70-80 percent is inactive or  “cold,” meaning it is unchanging and infrequently accessed. Given the  challenges of storing petabyte- or exabyte-scale data, public cloud and private  cloud ecosystems are focused on creating entirely new tiers of storage to deal  with the varying degrees of “data temperature.” The cold data tier is emerging  in a manner very similar to the way the “Tier 0” emerged over the past decade  to deal with critical performance requirements.   Now the industry is adding a new tier on the opposite end of the data  temperature spectrum, often referred to as “Tier 3” storage.

Cold  storage is the practice of creating a new tier of important information not  frequently accessed for long periods of time, and can include structured,  unstructured, or semi-structured data that has timeless value, and of which the  exact schedule of retrieval is
uncertain. As a result, data retrieval times can  be relaxed, compared to the speed at which hot data needs be retrieved.

Ultimately,  with purpose-built and cost-optimized cold data storage infrastructure and  devices, IT departments can deliver vastly improved time-to-archive and  time-to-retrieve cold/archive data that outstrips capabilities of monolithic  tape libraries, while utilizing standard
hard-drive based storage solutions  that are abundantly used and understood to realize optimal application value  and significant storage cost savings.

Availability

WD Ae hard drives will  be sold in box quantities of 20 and available to select distributors and integrators  starting late 2014. WD Ae drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty. More information about WD’s Ae datacenter  hard drives can be found on the company website at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1340.
WD Ae hard drives will also be  showcased in several key partner booths (Supermicro – booth # 700) at the Intel  Developer’s Forum (IDF) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.