WD has announced its innovative WD Ae line of hard drives designed for the unique operating characteristics of the emerging archive tier within web-scale data centres.
Built on a platform to achieve optimal TCO, WD Ae hard drives utilise the lowest possible power consumption and a Progressive Capacity model to enable a new tier of storage for large-scale cloud infrastructures.
“Modern data centre customers came to us with a need for an Hard Disk Drive (HDD) solution designed specifically for ever-expanding cold-data repositories,” says Matt Rutledge, senior vice-president and GM, storage technology, WD.
“Now in our third generation with over 700 Petabytes (PB) 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 optimised 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 data centre 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 data centres, 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 6Tb; Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) 6Gbps interface; and a workload and reliability rating of 60Tb per year workload and 500Khrs Mean Time Before Failure (MTbF).
“Data archiving has become increasingly important given the sheer volume of information organisations need to retain today. In addition, South Africa has a number of laws and regulations that stipulate extended retention periods for certain data. Keeping all of this information in Tier 1 storage is not cost effective or efficient, and thus this data is often offloaded onto lower storage tiers and eventually archived.
“The new WD Ae drives have been designed specifically for archive purposes to maximise cost efficiency as well as ensure the longevity and availability of data in line with data retention legislation,” says Kalvin Subbadu, components sales manager, WD South Africa.
As technology and manufacturing processes mature over time, incremental capacity increases are realised. WD’s innovative Progressive Capacity model allows distribution of these incrementally higher capacity models to take advantage of their fullest available capacity: 6,1Tb, 6,2Tb, or 6,3Tb, 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 data centres who can realise improvements in capacity-per-drive, capacity-per-volumetric space and reduced infrastructure overhead.
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-optimised 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 utilising standard hard-drive based storage solutions that are abundantly used and understood to realise optimal application value and significant storage cost savings.