The network attached entry level storage market is expected to grow at an 86.2% CAGR between 2011 and 2016, according to John Rydning, IDC’s Research vice president for hard disk drives. With this expected phenomenal increase the channel needs to make sure they benefit from this increase in demand and offer their customers the right solution.
With this rapidly growing segment WD, a Western Digital Company saw this as a prime opportunity to design a better solution and developed the WD Red drives, an optimised product for this rapidly-growing segment.
The sweet spot between desktop and enterprise drives has been somewhat ignored in terms of specific storage hard drive solutions a situation which resulted in the channel being in a tricky situation trying to find drives that can handle the technicalities of a RAID environment without sacrificing on price.
The channel can benefit significantly from hard drives that that are specifically made for NAS environments. They can now have the confidence when offering these solutions to their customers as they know these drives will work in different RAID environments at an attractive price point.
Giving the channel the right drive for the job will ultimately prevent end-users from trying to use alternative, price sensitive storage solutions that will result in systems issues and disk failure and consequentially more returns and customer downtime for resellers.
Kalvin Subbadu, WD sales manager – Components South Africa would like to discuss the how the channel can ultimately benefit from this rapidly growing segment with the introduction of the WD Red drives 4Tb 3,5-inch drive, taking NAS storage to unprecedented heights.
WD has also introduced the 2,5-inch format in 1Tb and 750Gb capacities for those that require a more compact form factor. He would also like to discuss the growth in smaller footprint NAS systems and what the local channel can expect.