Data is a critical component of doing business and as such, data centres are at the heart of today’s organisation. Ensuring you have enough capacity to store volumes of information as well as efficiently run the applications that enable business is key to success.
With these factors in mind, it stands to reason that ensuring you have the correct hard drives to support your data centre is absolutely vital, says Ruben Naicker, WD Product Specialist at Drive Control Corporation.
Using the incorrect hard drives for the job can have a host of repercussions, from performance degradation right through to application failure and even data loss. To simplify the task of optimising data centre performance and protecting data, WD offers a range of data centre hard disk drives (HDDs), each engineered for specific data centre scenarios.
These drives can be used in combination to deliver the right balance of performance, reliability, scalability and capacity.
WD Xe drives offer high-density performance storage for demanding applications, offering the industry’s best in class performance and highest reliability. They are ideal for demanding applications such as Online Transaction Processing (OTP), high-performance databases, database queries, analytics, video post-production and virtualised servers.
WD Xe comes in 2,5-inch form factor for high-density enclosures, maximising storage space and delivering lower power than larger form factors. WD Xe also comes pre-mounted in a 3,5-inch performance carrier, protecting investments in large form-factor equipment while allowing for upgrade to the latest in enterprise-class HDD technology.
The drive’s serial attached storage (SAS) interface contributes to its high performance, high availability and increased manageability.
Xe drives are designed for applications where performance and reliability are overriding criteria, offering the industry’s highest reliability rating at 2-million hours mean time before failure (MTBF) and a five-year warranty. Xe drives are available in capacities of 300GB, 450GB, 600GB and 900GB.
WD Re drives are data centre capacity HDDs offering durable capacity storage for high-availability deployments and data warehousing. Available in a 3,5-inch form factor in either SAS or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) interface with capacities from 250GB to 4TB, Re drives offer the industry’s highest capacity, class-leading reliability and ten times the workload capability of desktop drives.
WD Re is the workhorse of the WD’s data centre portfolio, designed for high-availability storage arrays such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID), which demand the most robust storage devices available. WD Re’s high performance, capacity and reliability make it ideal for data warehousing/mining and high-performance computing.
WD Re drives are also well suited to Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), high-reliability cloud storage and high-availability RAID arrays. If capacity without compromising on reliability is the requirement, Re drives are the right data centre drives for the job, with heavy workload capability, 24/7/365 reliability, 1,4-million hours MTBF (SAS)/1,2-million hours MTBF (SATA) and a five-year warranty.
WD Se drives offer optimal storage for Network Attached Storage (NAS) and scale-out architectures. The drives are designed to deliver the ideal combination of capacity, reliability and workload capability, offering a cost-effective solution for large-scale cloud deployments and entry to mid-range arrays for low workload applications.
The drives are ideal for any multi-bay enclosures, from entry-level servers to mid-range NAS and bulk cloud storage. With Advanced Format and a SATA interface, the Se drives deliver the lowest cost per GB of the WD enterprise drive portfolio, offering flexibility and value across all medium workload applications. These drives are ideal for bulk cloud storage, social networking, NAS, big data, replication-based distributed file systems, backup and archiving.
Available in a 3,5-inch form factor with a maximum capacity of 4TB, Se drives are the right blend of performance and power, with 24/7/365 reliability, an impressive 800 000 hours MBTF and a five year warranty. For data centre environments where application deployment requires enterprise-class features and can withstand lower performance and reliability for a more cost effective solution, WD Se is the right data centre storage device.
WD’s data centre storage portfolio with Xe, Re and Se drives is designed to meet the needs of today’s data centres, with drives that offer the right combination of performance, capacity, reliability and workload capability at the right cost per gigabyte.
With drives that serve all types and sizes of data centres, from traditional enterprise to scale-out architectures and large scale NAS, the WD Enterprise range delivers the building blocks of an effective, optimised data centre.