When it comes to making major progress in technology innovation, one of the limiting factors has been heat. Rapid advances in the microprocessor industry have fueled remarkable growth, yet chip makers constantly grapple with the demands of energy released at ridiculous speeds in absurdly small spaces.

The storage industry has wrestled with the heat dilemma as well. A shift to perpendicular magnetic recording, or PMR, technology in the mid-2000s allowed hard disk drive storage manufacturers to keep pace as data needs expanded. But PMR is beginning to reach capacity limits, and there are concerns that heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, may not be able to overcome reliability and cost issues.

HAMR uses a small laser that heats media during data storage, because scientists found that this process would increase data density. However, heating the media itself imposed limits as well, so Western Digital Corp. has introduced a new process called microwave-assisted magnetic recording, or MAMR, that uses an oscillator-driven microwave field instead. Voila! With more capacity and greater reliability, MAMR may propel the hard disk drive industry forward at a crucial time for enterprise technology.

“It’s a very meaningful announcement,” said John Rydning (pictured), research vice president of hard disk drives at IDC Research Inc. “With this announcement of MAMR technology, the direction that Western Digital is choosing really could put the industry on a new S curve in terms of putting more storage capacity on each of those disks.”

Rydning visited theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) during the Western Digital Presents: Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data event in San Jose, California. Frick also separately interviewed Dave Tang, senior vice president of corporate marketing and communications at Western Digital, and Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. They discussed the details of Western Digital’s announcements, shifting trends in the storage industry, the evolving role of flash drives and continued pressure that data centers will be under to manage information overload. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video interview with John Rydning below:

Expanded 40 terabyte drives and 100x improvement

This month’s announcements from Western Digital are significant in the storage capacity and resiliency that MAMR technology will provide when it becomes generally available in 2019. MAMR will allow Western Digital to offer hard drives with at least 40 terabytes of capacity and 2.5 million hours of reliability, a data-writing lifetime that is 100 times better than HAMR.

“We’ve plotted a course now that was relatively uncertain for the hard drive industry and the data center,” Grace said. “We can speak clearly now to the market and clearly to customers about the value proposition for rotating magnetic storage for decades to come.”

Although Western Digital had also invested in HAMR, the company was motivated to pursue a different solution because of an accelerating shift in the industry. When PMR technology entered the market, nearly 60 percent of the storage need was being driven by the personal computer industry. Now the model has completely flipped, with enterprise data centers holding a 60 percent share and growing, according to IDC’s Rydning.

Data centers are muscling up, and there is a strong need to increase storage capacity per cubic meter inside the operational infrastructure. “The demand for storage capacity by these large data centers is just phenomenal,” Rydning said.

Watch the complete video interview with Mark Grace below:

SSDs remain in the picture

With Western Digital placing hard disk drives squarely on the enterprise front burner, where will this leave flash-based solid state drives (or SSDs)? The company has sent signals that it doesn’t plan to stand by idly on the SSD front either. It paid $19 billion to purchase SanDisk Corp. two years ago and has been engaged for several months in a protracted struggle with Toshiba Corp. over the Japanese company’s NAND flash memory business.

The problem for SSDs in the data center is they currently cost a lot more than HDDs. Western Digital executives cite a 15x cost-per-terabyte difference between the two, which means a Brinks truck load of cash would be necessary to convert to SSDs and meet large-scale enterprise storage needs. That’s going to be a challenge for budget-conscious chief information officers.

“About 90 percent of the petabytes shipped to the enterprise are HDDs,” Rydning noted. “In the data center, you really need that bulk, low-cost storage capacity. But the two — SSDs and HDDs — are going to live together for a very long time.”

Covering the complete data environment

Western Digital’s latest moves indicate a desire to follow the trends in enterprise computing with a technology portfolio to meet cost and performance demands. Need to extend the data storage lifecycle at a higher capacity with less expense? Check. Interested in a flash solution? They’ve got that covered, too.

But the company is also taking a future focus as demonstrated by the new storage technology. “The useful life of data is growing exponentially along with the volume,” Tang explained. “You have to provide complete environments to capture and access and preserve and transform that data, which means we have to go well beyond storage and think about how that data is accessed.”

Western Digital’s breakthrough technology may go a long way toward meeting enterprise storage needs for the foreseeable future. The proliferation of IoT devices and growing fondness for data-intensive artificial intelligence technologies virtually ensures that the need to store vast amounts of information is not going to change anytime soon.

“Long live data; that’s what we say,” Grace said.

Watch the complete video interview with Dave Tang below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Western Digital Presents: Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Western Digital Presents: Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data event. Neither Western Digital Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE