Huawei Qualified Western Digital Hs14 SMR Helium-Based 14TB HDD

Western Digital Corporation announced that Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. has qualified its host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) helium-based HDD, the Ultrastar Hs14 – the first 14TB HDD designed for big data applications.

An early adopter of Western Digital’s SMR HDDs, Huawei is optimizing its distributed cloud storage OceanStor 9000 system for the sequential nature of data capture in video surveillance applications. Seeing the value in enabling significant TCO improvements, Huawei has made investments in the integration of Western Digital’s SMR HelioSeal HDDs, which deliver density, power efficiency and reliability.

“With the explosive growth of data, our worldwide customers from different industries require high density, good performance and low power to meet their growing demands. Huawei provides comprehensive data management solutions for customers based on high-performance all-flash storage for critical business scenarios. Huawei has optimized its distributed file system for massive unstructured data scenarios, which enables OceanStor 9000 to support capacity up to 14TB SMR drives. This helps customers to manage massive video data with a lower TCO,” said Meng Guangbin, president of storage product line, Huawei. “Huawei will continue to focus on the development of various emerging technologies, including storage medium, also through continuous technological innovation to help customers manage their data in a more efficient way.“

Large data volumes is the typical feature for video archiving, data backing up and more. OceanStor 9000 makes use of the Ultrastar Hs14 SMR drive’s capacity and drive characteristics through its ROW (Redirect on Write) technology. With the OceanStor 9000 solution based on 14TB SMR HDDs, customers can save up to 40% of a room’s floor space, and power consumption can be reduced by more than 40% compared to 8TB HDD solutions commonly used in the industry.

“Huawei is an early innovator and valued partner, and their qualification of our 14TB SMR HDD underscores the strength of our long-standing relationship,” said Mark Grace, SVP of devices, Western Digital. “Today, more than 70% of the exabytes we ship into the capacity enterprise segment are based on our HelioSeal technology platform, which deliver among the highest capacities and the lowest TCO for scale-out cloud and enterprise data centers. We’re proud that Huawei continues to see the technology innovation and value we bring to their business.”

The Ultrastar Hs14 is an enterprise 14TB HDD. Based on host-managed SMR technology, this 3.5-inch drive is optimized to deliver high capacity at low TCO. It provides capacity leadership by harnessing two core complementary technologies – fourth generation HelioSeal technology and second-generation host-managed SMR. These field proven technologies provide the foundation for delivering efficiency, quality and reliable performance required for cloud and hyperscale data center customers.

The Ultrastar Hs14 14TB HDDs are available.

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