Western Digital/HGST ActiveScale 5.1 Facilitating Data Forever Architecture

Western Digital Corporation introduced new features with its ActiveScale object storage 5.1 release that facilitates a data forever architecture.

Companies looking to increase their competitiveness are gaining insights from massive amounts of data over longer time periods. ActiveScale 5.1 helps customers implement a Data Forever strategy with seamless scalability of up to 52PB and data durability required for long-term storage.

Enterprises need to scale their storage in a fast and non-disruptive manner. Most traditional architectures grow as isolated silos and can’t take advantage of the latest technology for better TCO or suffer from unpredictable performance as they grow. ActiveScale’s ability to help create a Data Forever architecture allows seamless growth without sacrifice to performance, data durability or TCO.

“Western Digital has taken the best parts of object storage and combined those with its ‘Dynamic Data Placement’ to help its customers to not only keep – but also access – the most valuable data forever,” says Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, ESG. “ActiveScale is a self-protected platform with excellent resilience and recovery features; moreover, it neither locks its users into specific hardware nor requires a forklift upgrade or re-balancing when adding new capacity. Its massive data capacity can then be mined for insights, which can help unlock incremental business value.”

Enterprises need seamless scaling and data integrity that ActiveScale provides with its new features and architecture for customers to economically store, protect and access petabytes of data over multiple generations of storage systems.

New components of the ActiveScale architecture include:
• Dynamic Data Placement – to enable easy, non-disruptive upgrades and additional capacity in a single namespace without sacrifice to performance or data durability without rebalancing. This allows customers to easily integrate new generations of storage to leverage the latest improvements in TCO.
• Variable storage capacity – to ensure seamless data durability and scaling within and across systems with different capacities so that customers can scale and upgrade their hardware across drive and system generations.
• Seamless ability to scale capacity up and out in a single global namespace – to make growing capacity beyond a single rack or datacenter simple.
• Versioning of objects – for additional data durability to support simple recovery of data from user error or cyber threats.
• Improved erasure coding performance – to provide higher performance for improved productivity.

“Preserving our history is incredibly important to the legacy of Sundance Institute and the independent storytellers we support,” said Justin Simmons, director of technology services, Sundance Institute. “Western Digital has something no one else does – a system built for preservation that grows to petabyte scale and helps keep assets forever at an affordable cost. Centralizing our archives so they are secure, protected, searchable, and accessible to the entire organization solves our preservation problem and gives us a scalable solution for the future.”

“ActiveScale changes the fundamental economics of data by delivering capacity that is designed to be future proof for dramatically lower TCO,” said Phil Bullinger, GM, data center systems business unit, Western Digital. “The new architecture enables data center managers to easily transition to new storage capacities and ActiveScale hardware releases. And, with its Dynamic Data Placement capabilities, and simple and flexible capacity scaling features, ActiveScale eliminates hot spot problems of competing architectures, while pushing new boundaries in terms of storage operating and capital cost efficiency and effectiveness.”