HGST Joins Open Compute Project

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company) has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP), an initiative launched by Facebook, Inc. in 2011, to increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impacts of datacenters.

With the explosion of data resulting from mobile devices, Internet services, social media and business applications, corporate, cloud and big data customers are looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and their bottom line. The OCP applies open-source software principles to the hardware industry to drive the development of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. HGST will contribute its expertise toward defining storage solutions that deliver the performance and density required while achieving low TCO reflected in metrics such as cost-per-TB, watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight and TB-per-square foot.

"Demand for storage is booming as IT managers strive to handle the avalanche of new data being generated by cloud datacenters, big data analytics, social networking, HD video and millions of mobile devices," said Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing at HGST. "As a strategic drive supplier and consultant to Facebook and in collaboration with the OCP, we’re defining best practices in the storage industry to afford end-users with greater capital savings, operational efficiencies and energy conservation in the datacenter."

The fourth Open Compute Summit was January 16-17, 2013, in Santa Clara, CA. As a Summit sponsor, HGST showcased its Ultrastar 4TB enterprise HDD which provides space-efficient, performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. HGST also showcased its Ultrastar enterprise SSDs that meet the performance, capacity, endurance and reliability demands of tier 0, mission-critical datacenter applications.