Western Digital: coping with booming of data volume
Davide Villa, Director EMEAI Business Development of Western Digital then described the activities of his company which, in addition to WD external drives, also includes the SanDisk brands, leader in USB sticks and HGST, formerly IBM Storage for mass storage.
“Our history is synonymous with innovation from first hard drives that appeared at IBM in 1956, to the very first Flash memories with SanDisk in 1988, to the 96 layer QLC NAND storage introduced in 2018 and backup ZB data generated today by the largest applications. Innovation is our culture that translates into Western Digital having the 4th largest commercial patent portfolio in the world, behind Amazon, Google and Apple”.
An innovation that goes from chips to complete systems. “We are one of the remaining 5 global manufacturers of Flash memories, for which we internally develop our silicon, firmware, controllers that are used in SSD semiconductor static disks and HDD hard disks. Yet beyond these components, we assemble them to make integrated systems that require a lot more storage and performance (Big Data and Fast Data)”.
In enterprise systems, Western Digital's offering ranges from HDD and SSD storage disks to the most complex systems up to 1.4 inches in 4U racks. And the need is enormous: “Today, 90% of the data that exist are less than 2 years old. And the trend is not going to change. It is therefore necessary to offer the market ever more efficient storage systems to absorb this phenomenal amount of data, which is currently in the order of 2.5 EB produced per day or 1018 or one billion of billion bytes!”
According to IDC, 35 ZB, or 1021 of data have already been produced worldwide, while the global installed storage base is currently able to absorb 5 ZB only. And the situation will not improve because the same organization predicts that by 2025, 175 ZB of data will have been created, while all suppliers combined should be able to increase the global storage capacity from 5 to 22 ZB. “So we are under enormous pressure to develop larger storage systems more quickly to absorb most of this data, especially considering Western Digital represents 43% of the world's current storage capacity”.
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