Interviews

How Western Digital is constantly innovating to lower power draw and increase data resiliency

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Khalid Wani, Senior Director, Sales, India, Western Digital.

 

What is the Data center market in India looking like?

The world is creating and consuming an unprecedented amount of data today. According to projections, over the next three years up to 2025, global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes. One zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes. It is not just the data creation and consumption that has grown immensely, but also the appetite for capturing and storing that data to drive actionable insights. Therefore, organizations need to manage and store more data.

The growing volume of data augments the demand for a storage architecture that is flexible, scalable, reliable and secure, with reduced hardware costs. India’s data center capacity is expected to double, reaching over 1,700-1,800 megawatts (MW) by fiscal 2025, up from ~870 MW in 2021.

  1. Why do green data centers need to take the lead in the ecosystem?

The data demands will grow when enterprises start conducting business in the metaverse, which can potentially heighten the electronic waste problem. As the metaverse becomes more integrated with the real world, organizations will have to prepare for the next stage of digitization and storage demands, while prioritizing sustainability.

The subsequent question is where to store this massive amount of data. More local data centers may look at moving their data into the cloud– minimizing the amount of physical data centers. Additionally, large cloud service providers are investing heavily in sustainable energy sources. For example, Google is aiming to run data centers on completely carbon-free energy by 2030, and Microsoft has pledged to do so by 2025. This all leads to hyper-awareness among enterprises around the sustainability of their manufacturing practices.

Organizations are also looking at higher capacity HDDs that deliver higher data density, enabling data center expansion and efficiency. Perhaps the most significant innovations in HDDs in recent time is OptiNAND technology which optimizes the HDD with the integration of iNAND embedded flash. This reimagination of hard drive architecture includes enhanced firmware and SoC innovations for improved capacity, performance, and drive resiliency. Combining all these innovations into one device dramatically increases data storage capacity, lowers power draw, and increases data resiliency.  Western Digital has done exactly that with the world’s highest capacity drives, the Ultrastar® DC HC570 22TB CMR drive, which is already shipping.

  1. Why and How enterprises need to improve their data center sustainability?

Data centers are among the largest consumers of power and electricity and have the fastest-growing carbon footprint of any sector within the IT industry. In fact, electricity accounts for 45-50% of the operating expense of data centers. To help keep energy usage in check and decrease total cost of ownership (TCO) factors, Western Digital is constantly innovating hard disk drives (HDDs).

Helium has been one of the greatest breakthroughs for HDDs. Being seven times lighter than air, helium creates less drag and turbulence when HDD platters spin. It runs at cooler temperatures, and when sealed, it keeps out humidity. Energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), another important innovation, increases storage density by increasing the accuracy of data placement on the disk which then increases tracks per in (TPI) and bits per inch (BPI). Denser storage means a smaller footprint.

Perhaps the most significant innovations in HDDs in recent time is OptiNAND technology which optimizes the HDD with the integration of iNAND embedded flash. This reimagination of hard drive architecture includes enhanced firmware and SoC innovations for improved capacity, performance, and drive resiliency.

Combining all these innovations into one device dramatically increases data storage capacity, lowers power draw, and increases data resiliency.  Western Digital has done exactly that with the world’s highest capacity drives, the Ultrastar® DC HC570 22TB CMR drive, which is already shipping. Moreover, the Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs will feature 22TB HDDs, delivering the industry’s highest storage density of up to 2.244* petabytes of storage, in a fully optimized platform for added durability and data reliability for software-defined storage.

  1. How companies will be leveraging innovative alternative cooling technologies

Data centres are typically maintained at an average temperature of 68 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which requires a lot of electricity to keep them cool. Cooling contributes for 30 to 50% of overall energy usage in a data centre.

Another method to reduce the amount of energy needed for storage is to use hard drives filled with helium rather than ones filled with air. As helium has a density that is one-seventh that of air, there is less turbulence within the drive. This has a number of advantages, including as increasing the number of discs that can fit into the same 3.5-inch form factor, lowering the drag on the spinning discs, and eventually using less power.

  1. How is Western Digital positioned in the market?

Western Digital is positioned as a leading provider of data center storage solutions. Storage is essentially the backbone of the data center. The company offers a range of data center solutions, including high-capacity hard drives, solid-state drives, and storage platforms designed for cloud and big data environments. Success in business might strongly rely on one’s capacity to access data and extract insights for future innovation, product design, financial choices, and other equally crucial activities. This is because the amount of data collected every day is continuing to grow at an exponential rate.

The foundation of Western Digital’s own innovation is the capacity to liberate potential through data. Indian data centres are expanding because of the country’s rapid data growth, making Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD essential. As a pioneer in storage innovation, we are always looking for ways to meet the industry’s capacity needs and support the changing economics of data centres for years to come. Last year, the world’s largest capacity drive, the Ultrastar® DC HC570 22TB CMR drive started shipping in the country which provides an additional boost to the growing ecosystem. At Western Digital, we approach everything with the conviction that human potential, when it combines with digital innovation, opens up possibilities. This prospect is enabled by a technology platform on which the world’s inventors are building to enable the finest new experiences — intelligent gadgets powered by the cloud and linked by high-performance networks.

Moreover, Western Digital are making breakthroughs not only in algorithms, motor as well as internal power supply, that keeps pushing the power down, even when the capacity increases.

  1. What is the opportunity in the data center market, especially with the government push on the same?

The government of India recently announced an investment of INR three lakh crore in the data center ecosystem over the next five years. Further, the Cabinet cleared the policy wherein states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana will have an exclusive policy for the sector. This policy enables more Indian states to develop the infrastructure, thus further accelerating the growth of data centers in the country.

One cannot deny that data centers are consistently growing in size and number—a pace that is unlikely to slow down in the foreseeable future.

  1. What are the key challenges you are facing?

The world is becoming more data centric. Organizations must rethink their data strategy and explore the value and benefits of flash and HDD, as these are playing a transformative role in shaping data infrastructure and architecture. While flash offers extreme performance, HDD-based storage is a relatively cost-effective backup and archive solution that delivers extreme high-capacity. It’s what powers at-scale cloud providers and many organizations are leveraging these efficiencies by adopting it in their on-premises data center. The right strategy will be a right mix of flash and disk-based storage solutions depending on the requirements.

As the amount of data created daily continues a parabolic rise, the success of an enterprise can heavily relies on the ability to access data and extract insights for future innovation, product design, financial decisions, and other equally essential functions, while designing infrastructure with the lowest TCO. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that data centers are designed and run as next-gen data centers.

Now is the time to harness the potential of data to explore what’s next!

 

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