HGST Partners with Harvard University Clean Energy Project

HGST is
partnering with the Harvard
University Clean Energy Project (CEP) and providing HGST enterprise
Ultrastar HDDs to house the project’s research data.

Harvard’s CEP utilizes the World Community Grid, a distributed volunteer
computing platform, to computationally study millions of potential chemical
structures and identify the one that will enable the next-generation of plastic
solar cells. These cells will be cost-effective and easy to manufacture in high
volume in order to bring electricity to the estimated 2.5 billion people around
the world living in rural areas without access to the power grid. Harvard’s CEP
volunteers generate approximately 750GB of data per day. Today, the project
has stored 400TB of data on HGST drives.

"The data
we’re creating will ultimately benefit mankind with cleaner energy solutions,"
said Alan Aspuru-Guzik, who is an associate professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. "It is mission critical that our data be
stored safely. Accordingly, we designed our Jabba storage arrays with built-in
redundancies. But the key to the arrays’ performance is the use of reliable,
high-capacity, and low-power storage from HGST. We’ve filled nearly 150 HGST
drives to this point and are currently building Jabba5 and 6 to handle the
enormous amount of data generated for the project."

"HGST is
honored to be involved in the Harvard CEP program. We believe their work has
great potential for enabling the widespread deployment of solar power,"
said Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing at HGST. "It’s exciting to see that the efforts we
have put into making sure our HDDs provide world-class reliability will play a
part in bringing electricity to billions around the world and improving their
quality of life."

Proven in 24×7, high-transaction computing
environments, Ultrastar enterprise HDDs meet complex mission-critical
storage and access needs delivering performance and reliability
with capacities up to 4TB. The 7,200 RPM Ultrastar family is a popular and high-capacity HDDs for enterprise
applications offering a five-year limited warranty and rated for a 2.0 million
hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40% lower annualized failure rate
(AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.