Western Digital's 14 TB HDD Qualified by Huawei for Big Data Applications

As a leader in enterprise-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) and the inventor of helium HDD technology, Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that Huawei has qualified its host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) helium-based HDD, the Ultrastar Hs14 - the industry's first 14TB HDD designed for demanding big data applications. An early adopter of Western Digital's SMR HDDs, Huawei is breaking new ground by optimizing its distributed cloud storage OceanStor 9000 system for the sequential nature of data capture in video surveillance applications. Seeing the value in enabling significant TCO improvements, Huawei has made considerable investments in the integration of Western Digital's SMR HelioSeal HDDs, which deliver unsurpassed density, power efficiency and reliability.

"With the explosive growth of data, our worldwide customers from different industries require high density, good performance and low power to meet their growing demands. Huawei provides comprehensive data management solutions for customers based on high-performance all-flash storage for critical business scenarios. Huawei has optimized its distributed file system for massive unstructured data scenarios, which enables OceanStor 9000 to support capacity up to 14TB SMR drives. This helps customers to manage massive video data with a lower TCO," said Meng Guangbin, president of storage product line at Huawei. "Huawei will continue to focus on the development of various emerging technologies, including storage medium, also through continuous technological innovation to help customers manage their data in a more efficient way."

Large data volumes is the typical feature for video archiving, data backing up and more. Huawei's OceanStor 9000 makes full use of the Ultrastar Hs14 SMR drive's capacity and drive characteristics through its ROW (Redirect on write) technology. With the OceanStor 9000 solution based on high-density 14TB SMR hard drives, customers can save up to 40 percent of a room's floor space, and power consumption can be reduced by more than 40 percent compared to 8TB hard drive solutions commonly used in the industry today.

"Huawei is an early innovator and valued partner, and their qualification of our 14TB SMR HDD underscores the strength of our long-standing relationship," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of Devices at Western Digital. "Today, more than 70 percent of the exabytes we ship into the capacity enterprise segment are based on our HelioSeal technology platform, which deliver among the highest capacities and the lowest TCO for scale-out cloud and enterprise data centers. We're proud that Huawei continues to see the technology innovation and value we bring to their business."

The Ultrastar Hs14 is the world's first enterprise-class 14TB HDD. Based on host-managed SMR technology, this 3.5-inch HDD is optimized to deliver the highest capacity at low TCO. It provides unprecedented capacity leadership by harnessing two core complementary technologies - fourth generation HelioSeal technology and second-generation host-managed SMR. These field proven technologies provide the foundation for delivering efficiency, quality and reliable performance required for cloud and hyperscale data center customers.

The Ultrastar Hs14 14TB HDDs are now available.