WD Data Center Systems Business Gains Momentum

Western Digital Corp. announced that its Data Center Systems (DCS) business continues to gain momentum with record growth and achievements, as enterprise and cloud-scale customers accelerate deployment of DCS solutions to meet the data infrastructure demands of a range of applications, including business-critical databases, decision-support systems, and real-time analytics.

With a vertically-integrated data infrastructure design, development, and manufacturing model – from silicon to systems – DCS delivers solutions with performance and economic efficiency to help customers protect, mobilize, transform, and extract greater value from data within increasingly specialized environments in the data center.

Developments and Momentum Driving Growth:
• Shipping more than 3EB of systems and platforms in 2018 and achieving 17x revenue growth since it was established in 2016
• Adding more than 150 new global customers per quarter including Doctors.net, Egan company, NFON, NxtGen, RazorBlue, Safeway Insurance, Saudi Petroleum, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Wish.com, Biomedical Research Computing at the University of Oxford
• Expanding global sales and marketing coverage in Europe, Middle East, India, and Japan
• Growing  Enterprise Partner Program with more than 800 channel partners who receive incentives and gain access to a selection of resources to help create solutions and services that target specific markets and customer needs while growing their business and maximizing profitability
• Leading the transformation to next-generation storage infrastructure with its IntelliFlash N-Series, one of first unified NVMe AFAs, and laying the foundation for NVMe-oF with its OpenFlex open composable Shared Accelerated Storage platform and architecture
• Increasing the cadence of product delivery across the entire DCS portfolio of storage platforms, NVMe systems, AFAs, and object storage systems
• Accelerating software innovations in flash data management, data mobility, open composability, predictive data analytics, and cloud-based management with more than 400 R&D engineers
• Recognized as a Visionary in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays (1). Additionally, receiving high ratings in the recent Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Solid-State Arrays (2) report for IntelliFlash arrays
• Facilitating a ‘data forever’ architecture with ActiveScale object storage systems. Being recognized as a Challenger in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage (3). Additionally, receiving high ratings in the recent Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Distributed File Systems and Object Storage (4)
• Partnering with more than 50 ISVs, enabling integrated solutions that help simplify deployment and accelerate time-to-value for a variety of market segments, including e-commerce, healthcare/life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications, online-gaming and financial services.

“Western Digital’s DCS group has become a key partner of ours, driven by its innovative storage systems and platforms, and its steadfast commitment to the channel,” said Marco Mohajer, president, Technologent, Inc. “With their expanded team, high-touch model, and strong ISV alliances, we’re working together to address new challenges and win new business for next-generation workloads driven by analytics, machine learning, IoT and more. We look forward to our continued relationship with DCS to help grow our business and explore new market opportunities.”

“It is clear from IDC primary research that those enterprises undergoing digital transformation – that is, the evolution to business models that treat and leverage data as a strategic capital asset – are investing in new technologies to drive IT infrastructure modernization, including AFAs, SDS, and unstructured storage platforms, at rates that are 17 to 46 times that of the rate of organizations not pursuing digital transformation,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC. “Vendors like Western Digital who have innovative, competitive offerings in all these areas and are engaging with these more forward-looking companies are enjoying high revenue growth as a result.”

“The continued, unabated growth of data and its strategic value is driving a transformation of IT infrastructures as never before,” said Phil Bullinger, SVP and GM of Western Digital’s DCSs business unit. “As data center customers face these new and relentless demands, they’re looking to partner with a company they can trust with the capabilities, products and resources they need. Western Digital is that company. By applying our decades of storage expertise and semiconductor memory intellectual property to holistically innovate from silicon to systems, we help our customers solve data infrastructure challenges in a way that no other vendor can. We are thrilled to be able to assist all of our valued customers in accelerating and protecting their digital ecosystems.”

Phil Bullinger’s blog: 4 Things You Didn’t Know About DCS

DCS Portfolio – Enabling Data Center Transformation
The portfolio addresses a range of on-premises and private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, as well as supporting varied applications and workloads, including real-time AI/ML, big data analytics, virtualized enterprise applications, high-performance databases and high-density geo-dispersed cloud-scale repositories to name a few. With heavier workloads demanding more compute resources than before, IT leaders are turning to te company to help design, architect, and deploy high-performance, scalable and flexible data-centric infrastructures that deliver the performance, scalability, and peace of mind they are seeking for their businesses today and into the future.

IntelliFlash N-Series, an unified NVMe AFA is a differentiated next-gen enterprise flash storage system that delivers performance and economics for data consolidation. The IntelliFlash NVMe array places fast data across multiple grades of flash storage media for performance acceleration and responsiveness. With a set of data services including inline compression and deduplication, along with native support for SAN and NAS protocols, IntelliFlash arrays are deployed at thousands of customer sites worldwide to accelerate applications common in transaction processing, real-time analytics, databases, virtualization, and file services workloads.

• ActiveScale petabyte-scale, hybrid-cloud object storage system provides a cost-effective, scalable solution for unstructured data growth and facilitates a data-forever architecture. S3-compatible, the system delivers elastic scaling (up and out), data durability (up to 19 nines), and single-plane-of-glass management, to store all types of unstructured big data.
• Ultrastar software-defined storage (SDS) storage servers and platforms are a family of all-flash, hybrid and disk storage platforms that are an element of next-gen disaggregated storage and SDS systems, delivering high density and the flexibility to balance performance with cost. This family provides up to 1.4PB of raw storage in a compact and efficient form factor. All Ultrastar platforms support up to 24 SSDs in a hybrid configuration, enabling a performance storage tier for demanding applications.
• OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable infrastructure will enable the transformation of data centers into next-gen scalable and flexible environments to address the diverse applications and complex data workflows of today’s business. Enabling NVMe-oF, OpenFlex allows organizations to compose virtual storage systems from shared pools of data center resources, incorporating disk, flash, and compute via an Open Composable API. An innovation is enabling disk-based resources to share the same fabric and protocol as flash-based storage, offering flexibility and value. Virtual systems will now be composed while balancing SLAs against cost demands. OpenFlex can save up to 40% of TCO over conventional HCI approaches.

(1) Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, John Monroe, Joseph Unsworth, Santhosh Rao, July 23, 2018.
(2) Gartner, Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Solid-State Arrays, Peer Contributors, January 23, 2019.
(3) Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, John McArthur, October 18, 2018.
(4) Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, Peer Contributors, March 7, 2019