SAN JOSE, Calif., March 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- With more than one
million helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs) deployed,
HGST (@HGSTStorage), a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC)
today announced it has achieved a new milestone in reliability as
the only manufacturer with drives field-proven and rated for two
and a half (2.5) million hours mean time between failure (MTBF).
Today's news demonstrates that HGST's helium HDDs are poised to
become the mainstream choice for data center applications where
storage density, reliability and power efficiency are paramount.
Now shipping its second generation HelioSeal Platform drives, HGST
is shifting its volume mix and ramping Helium production to meet
strengthening customer demand across cloud and mainstream data
center applications.
Path To True TCO
With strong market acceptance from the largest cloud service
providers, Internet giants, OEMs and businesses around the world,
including Netflix, Huawei, Inspur, HP, OVH, Starline, Buffalo,
DataON, DDN and Racktop to name a few, the HGST HelioSeal
Platform represents proven innovation in high-capacity HDD
technology and reliability, while lowering true total cost of
ownership (TCO). While there are a number of ways to increase hard
drive capacity, HGST's HelioSeal platform is the only technology to
provide unmatched reliability and a long-term path for delivering
higher capacity storage on a standard 3.5-inch HDD form factor,
while lowering power and drive temperature at the same time. All
this equates to best storage density, TB-per-system weight, TB/Sq.
foot and lowest watt/TB for enterprise and cloud data centers.
Since introducing the technology in 2013, HGST has been steadily
increasing volume production to enable an expanding set of
customers to enjoy the proven benefits of its Helium-filled
technology. Now in its second generation, HGST's HelioSeal platform
is gaining broader customer support and the company is increasing
production of its Ultrastar® He8, 8TB drives – the highest capacity
available in the market that delivers full performance for all
capacity-optimized applications. HGST's HelioSeal technology allows
this to be accomplished at standard 7,200 RPM performance with low
power while competitive air based products typically reduce RPM and
performance to achieve lower power.
Both the Ultrastar® He8 and the Ultrastar He6 families now
feature an unprecedented reliability rating of 2.5M hours
MTBF. Due to its patented manufacturing process and the
inherent benefits of Helium, HGST's HelioSeal drives are field
proven and have a more robust design margin than traditional air
based drives. The HGST Helium drives are hermetically-sealed, which
keep air, humidity and other contaminates out of the drive,
allowing them to be used in harsh or ambient environments. The
Helium inside the drives also reduces disk vibration and flutter,
adding to even greater reliability.
HGST will continue to extend its capacity leadership by
combining two complementary technologies: HelioSeal technology and
Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) in its industry-leading 10TB
helium-drives. The additive nature of these two technologies,
combined with the economies of scale provided by increased
Helium-drive manufacturing capacity, will further enhance HGST's
TCO advantage. HGST expects that by 2017, 50 percent of its
enterprise capacity drive shipments will be Helium.
"Based on the patented HelioSeal technology, HGST's Ultrastar
Helium-filled drives are the only drives that improve data center
TCO on virtually every level—from storage density, power and
cooling costs, to reliability, capacity and more. We also believe
it is the only way to get to higher densities therefore higher
capacities while maintaining reliability. All of these factors
contribute to defining the true TCO of the data center," said
Brendan Collins, vice president of
product marketing, HGST. "With more than one million drives
deployed, the rapid industry adoption of this revolutionary
technology affirms our commitment to Helium as the foundation for
all future scaling technologies. With a valued-based pricing
strategy in place and manufacturing investments to promote the
increased volumes, HGST is on an accelerated path to delivering
higher capacities and better TCO into existing and future form
factor designs."
Driving Down Data Center TCO: The Value of HelioSeal
Technology
With the amount of new data being created and replicated
doubling every two years, data center architects have a lot to
consider when planning for future growth. Capacity growth is only
one piece of the equation. The additional power, cooling and floor
space required to operate that extra storage is another, and can
add up. Leveraging the inherent benefits of Helium, HGST's
HelioSeal technology delivers today's lowest TCO for enterprise and
cloud data centers through:
- Greater power efficiency – Disks spin more easily in a
helium-filled environment, resulting in 23% lower operating power.
The 8TB helium drives consume just 5.1 watts during idle operation,
a 44% reduction in watts-per-TB compared to conventional 6TB
air-based HDDs, creating greener data centers with reduced energy
costs and carbon footprint.
- Leading storage density – Helium is essential to
maintaining the required reliability for future generation drives
beyond 8TB. Industry-leading 8TB capacity in a 3.5-inch HDD
footprint, which are plug-and-play in virtually any data center
environment, delivers 33% more storage capacity for mainstream
applications than competitive 6TB offerings.
- Lower cooling requirements – HGST Helium-filled drives
typically run 4 degrees – 5 degrees C cooler, which lowers power
and cooling costs and leads to better field reliability, allowing
HGST to increase its MTBF specification for the He6 and He8
drives.
- Better weight-per-TB – Up to 38% lower
weight-per-TB for improved environmental conditions in high-density
deployments and allows for more storage capacity where building
codes enforce floor loading limits.
- Environmental robustness – Use them virtually anywhere,
including ambient air, free cooling data centers. Many
air-filled drives use a breather filter leading to reliability
problems when used in environments with high levels of carbon or
dust, or in high altitudes. This problem does not exist with
HelioSeal drives as they're hermetically sealed.
- Value $/TB – Higher volume production for its
second-generation 8TB HelioSeal HDD leads to lower cost to the
market.
HGST is shipping its 6TB Ultrastar He6 and 8TB Ultrastar He8
helium-filled drives in volume today. HGST's 10TB Helium HDDs with
SMR are sampling with select customers. For more information,
please visit: http://www.hgst.com.
Follow HGST on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and
#HGSTStorage #LongLiveData
TWEET THIS: HGST (@HGSTStorage) achieves industry-leading
milestone in field reliability and deploys 1 million #HeliumHDDs
http://bit.ly/1ChZrFL #LongLiveData
Quote Sheet:
Qiu Long, President, Server
Business, IT Product Line, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., said, "To
support the customers' rapid business growth as well as to
efficiently scale, servers and massive data centers must optimize
TCO to help manage capacity, power, cooling and storage density. We
congratulate HGST on their one millionth helium hard drive
deployment. HGST's HelioSeal platform is an excellent innovation,
delivering advanced technology to help meet the growing capacity
and TCO needs in the data center."
"HGST's HelioSeal drives are ideal storage solutions which offer
the lowest TCO for hyperscale cloud storage applications. In an
open-air datacenter like ours, we demand the highest storage
capacity and the lowest power consumption without sacrificing
performance and reliability. HelioSeal Platform can protect the
hard drives from contaminates in the air and enable the drives to
operate in ambient environments," said Li
Jin, Inspur group vice president.
"Congratulations to HGST on its one millionth helium drive
deployment," said David Fullagar,
director of content delivery architecture at Netflix. "We stream
millions of movies and TV shows to consumers around the world,
24/7, so there's incredible demand on our content delivery
infrastructure. As an early adopter and proponent of HGST's
HelioSeal platform, we quickly saw the benefits of this technology
as it delivers the best storage density, reliability and the lowest
power for our video streaming appliances."
"To accommodate the increasing amount of data running through
enterprise datacenters today, our customers are realizing the need
for higher-density storage solutions," said Trevor Schick, senior vice president, HP
Enterprise Group Global Supply Chain and Quality. "HGST's HelioSeal
drives provide HP customers with increased capacity to maximize
datacenter efficiency, without incurring excessive costs."
"Being at the cutting edge of technology innovation is part of
our DNA. When we first heard about HGST's helium drives we knew we
had to be an early adopter," explained Miroslaw Klaba, vice
president of R&D at OVH. "HGST's 6TB drives were integrated
into the OVH data centres over a year ago. We've been impressed
with the overall performance and reliability of the drives. HGST's
has helped us to optimise efficiency within the OVH data centres.
We plan to continue to integrate the HelioSeal platform as it is an
integral part of our data centre design moving forward."
"Our disk arrays from the RAIDdeluxe RDL-BD64 series with 64
hard drive trays in a 4U rack already provide massive storage
capacity, and with HGST's 8TB HelioSeal hard drives we can achieve
up to 512TB with substantially lower power consumption," said
Bernd Widmaier, sales director of
Starline Computer GmbH. "Through the efficient utilization of space
and the higher capacity of 8TB per hard drive, our clients
immediately have several advantages. The total cost of ownership is
lowered through the higher packing density and lower power
consumption along with higher storage capacity with continued high
data transfer rates and reduced space required in the rack."
"We want to congratulate HGST on achieving its more than one
millionth Helium hard drive deployment. HGST Helium-filled hard
drives are the most suitable solution to increase storage capacity
and lower TCO and meets other recent requirements for data center
applications," said Mr. Taiji
Watanabe, director, member of the Board, General Manager,
NAS Business Unit, Buffalo Inc. "HelioSeal Technology attracts
customers' attention around the world. Buffalo will continue to
offer the best business solutions to our customers using HGST
drives."
"HGST's HelioSeal Helium HDD platform has become the de facto
standard in our mainstream enterprise Cluster-in-a-Box storage
appliances where capacity density, power efficiency and reliability
are paramount," said Trenton R.
Baker, vice president business development, DataON Storage.
"HGST's HelioSeal platform is revolutionary, and we are honored to
be one of the first partners to adopt this technology. Helium-based
HDDs provide a path for higher-capacity storage, as evident where
the DataON CiB-9470 V12 delivers better than a one-half petabyte in
a single appliance offering the best $/TB, watt/TB, TB-per-system
weight and TB/Sq. foot for our big data and cloud hosting
customers."
"Industry leading performance and reliability are critical
factors for DDN customers dealing with large scale, high
performance Big Data and Web/Cloud environments. Over the last
year, DDN has worked with HGST to deliver customers fast, high
capacity storage solutions built with HGST HelioSeal drives. With
one of the largest capacity drives in the market and
industry-leading reliability, we are pleased to build on our
relationship with the addition of the new 8TB Helium drives to our
award-winning SFA12K and SFA7700 systems, along with the SS7000 and
SS8460 enclosures," said Molly Rector, Chief Marketing
Officer, DDN.
"The HGST Helium drives enable us to offer a cloud with
revolutionary density and reduced power usage, which facilitates
economically efficient storage of PBs of data for our customers,"
said Jonathan Halstuch, CTO and
co-founder, Racktop systems.
About HGST
HGST is a wholly owned and independently operated subsidiary of
Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC). HGST sets the pace for
storage innovation and is helping the world harness the power of
data. Building on its reputation for producing reliable HDDs, SSDs,
and developing tighter integration with software, HGST is
optimizing storage efficiency and reliability for today's
data-centric economy. Founded by the creators of the hard drive,
HGST serves a broad range of market segments, including enterprise,
cloud, OEM, mobile, consumer electronics and personal storage. HGST
was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in
San Jose, California. For more
information, please visit www.hgst.com.
This press release contains forward-looking statements,
including statements relating to expected availability dates for
HDD and/or SSD storage products. These forward-looking
statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause
actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the
forward-looking statements, including changes in markets, demand,
uncertainties related to the development, introduction, and timing
of products based on new technologies, and other risks and
uncertainties listed in Western Digital's recent SEC filings to
which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not
to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which
speak on as of the date hereof, and HGST/WD undertakes no
obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect
subsequent events or circumstances.
One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB
(one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on
operating environment and formatting.
HelioSeal and Long Live Data are trademarks, and Ultrastar is a
registered trademark of HGST, a Western Digital Company. Western
Digital, WD, and the WD logo are registered trademarks of Western
Digital Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of
their respective owners.
MTBF is a statistical representation of drive reliability under
median operating conditions. MTBF ratings are not intended to
predict an individual drive's reliability and does not constitute a
warranty.
Contact:
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Erin
Hartin
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Katie
Watson
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HGST
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Porter
Novelli
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Office:
303-284-7790
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Cell:
408-439-2002
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Erin.Hartin@HGST.com
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HGST_Team@porternovelli.com
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