By Mr. Owais Mohammed, Director of Sales – India, Middle East, and Africa, Western Digital
The increasing number of connected devices is largely responsible for the remarkable speed at which data is being created. According to research, currently, there are about 15 billion connected IoT devices worldwide. When it comes to India, the connected devices market is projected to expand from USD 41 billion in 2023 to USD 171.7 billion by 2032. This surge in connected devices and data generation calls for efficient data storage solutions. As a result, the hard disk drive (HDD) remains the go-to storage solution for enterprises and data centers (DCs) for efficiently storing data at scale.
HDDs have proven to be an important and reliable data storage medium—the technology continues to get better with higher capacity, low power and reliability. Innovations such as the introduction of helium-filled solutions have been a game changer in the HDD industry. A recent IDC report, predicts that by 2028, HDDs will account for nearly 80% of the storage used in cloud and hyperscale data centers.
Sustainability is another aspect which has helped HDDs gain popularity. With the rapid expansion of data centers across the country, adopting a tiered storage approach with high-capacity drives has become essential. Adopting the highest capacity drives not only maximizes real estate efficiency (better capacity per square foot), cutting down space requirements, but also lowers power consumption—resulting in substantial long-term savings and supporting sustainable operations.
India becoming home for Data centers
India is fast emerging as a global data centre hub due to several favorable factors, such as lower cost of construction, land and power compared to other countries. Additionally, India already has well-established IT infrastructure, talented workforce, favorable policies, and a digitally enabled services ecosystem, which serves as a strong foundation for the development of a robust data centre industry.
With the growing demand, the need for sustainable DCs is also increasing in India. With higher-capacity drives, data centers can achieve the same storage capabilities while reducing the overall number of drives required to save the same amount of data. This leads to not only a smaller facility footprint, but DC owners also benefit from less complex infrastructure, and reduced energy and resource consumption.
Lowered cost
To stay competitive, DC owners must adopt a new digital approach that enables them to acquire, store, and analyse vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data. Therefore, DCs are seeking storage solutions with the lowest overall TCO, i.e., power consumption, rack density and dollar per terabyte.
For example, upgrading 24TB CMR HDDs to the new 32TB SMR HDDs to deploy 192PB of storage would require up to 23% fewer servers and could use up to 20% lower energy consumption in Watts/TB idle to store the same amount of data. Eliminating the extra servers also reduces infrastructure and maintenance costs. So overall, TCO savings is achieved by using higher capacity 32TB and eliminating servers and all other supporting infrastructure.
Going Green
Further, using helium-filled hard drives instead of air-filled ones also helps in lowering the power consumption. Since helium has a lower density that is one-seventh of that of air, it causes much less turbulence, enabling more disks in the same 3.5-inch form factor, reducing drag on spinning disks and leading to lower power consumption overall – even with additional platters. Innovative 11-disk HDDs are available today with capacities reaching 26TB CMR and 32TB SMR HDDs. Less power consumption means cooler operation and reduction in cooling requirements, reducing both costs and carbon footprint.
Combined with renewable energy initiatives and other eco-friendly practices, HDDs help enable more sustainable, scalable, and eco-conscious data center operations that align with a company’s broader sustainability targets.
Future of HDDs
Data and data storage continue to grow at an unprecedented rate. Innovations in HDD technology consistently strive to deliver the capacity, performance and low power required to meet those demands.
With capacities of up to 28TB for CMR and 32TB for SMR, Western Digital is the HDD capacity leader, leveraging numerous patents and innovations to deliver capacity, performance, low power and reliability at scale for the world’s largest hyperscale, cloud, enterprise/DC customers. Its high-capacity HDDs are unmatched for storing more data, lowering TCO, and helping customers meet sustainability goals for an ecofriendly future.
Covered By: NCN MAGAZINE / Western Digital
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