Western Digital and Dropbox Team to Accelerate Deployment of Cloud Infrastructure for Online World

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced that Dropbox Inc. is one of the first to qualify the Ultrastar DC HC650 20TB, host-managed, shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs.

Ultrastar DC HC650 20TB SMR HDDs and Dropbox custom-built storage platforms are accelerating the deployment of infrastructure for increasing cloud storage demands.
(Photo: Business Wire)

With SMR HDDs serving as the Storage foundation for its custom-built, multi-exabyte storage platforms, Dropbox continues its strategic path, taking advantage of the high storage density with low TCO without sacrificing data durability and availability for its 600 million+ online customers.

“We’ve been working with Western Digital for many years, and throughout several phases of our storage platform development,” said Andrew Fong, VP, engineering, Dropbox. “Online tools and services are more important than ever before, so we need to be able to quickly innovate, expand functionality and scale to help stay competitive. We look forward to deploying these higher capacity 20TB SMR HDDs to further our cost savings and to provide our customers with even more value. Western Digital is an important strategic partner and we look forward to continuously pushing cloud infrastructure boundaries together.“

“Dropbox was a pioneer in adopting SMR at scale, and their commitment has definitely paid off, giving them an early mover advantage by enabling rapid development of the highest capacity HDDs in the industry into their cloud infrastructure,” said Andrew Dorian, VP, enterprise HDDs, WDC. “We are pleased to continue our long-term partnership with Dropbox to help them scale and capitalize on the growing customer demand for cloud services, online storage and remote collaboration tools.“

As the industry’s first 20TB HDDs, the Ultrastar DC HC650 delivers TCO for scale-out enterprise and cloud data centers through increased storage density and improved power efficiency. Featuring the highest capacity in the industry, cloud and enterprise customers recognize the benefits of SMR HDDs and are adopting the technology to contend with the massive growth in data. When considering exabyte-scale needs, and associated capital and operating cost of the data center, the long-term value in terms of lower cost-per-terabyte, higher density, low power and high reliability can help benefit the bottom line.

Several complementary technology innovations are featured in the Ultrastar DC HC650, including the industry’s first energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) implementation, the industry’s first triple-stage actuator and the 5th generation of HelioSeal technology.

These SMR HDDs are also an integral part of Zoned Storage, an open-source, standards-based initiative building upon the synergies of SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs that enables data centers to scale efficiently.

Resources:
Cloud amid COVID-19
Three Technologies that Make HDD Magic
Making Host Managed SMR Work for You – Dropbox’s Successful Journey
Dropbox Continues to Innovate with Western Digital
Continuous Innovation for Highest Capacities and Lower TCO Technical Brief