UPDATED 13:43 EDT / JUNE 28 2018

BIG DATA

China, blockchain and chips: Western Digital looks beyond storage

Executives at Western Digital Corp. have a lot on their minds these days. This week, their attention was focused on new additions to the company’s data center portfolio involving object storage, enhanced all-flash arrays and a new hybrid storage server platform.

Last week, the company launched new artificial intelligence-equipped drives for surveillance cameras and released a wireless solid-state drive geared for the travel industry. All in all, it has been a busy month.

Yet below the publicity radar, Western Digital is also pursuing a number of projects and initiatives that don’t garner quite as much attention. “We’re probably not the company that you think we are,” Dave Tang (pictured), senior vice president of corporate marketing and communications for Western Digital, declared during a Wednesday press briefing at the company’s headquarters in San Jose, California.

Object storage for Chinese market

Take the company’s rollout today of its ActiveScale 5.3 Object Storage System. The next-generation release offers hybrid cloud replication and “data forever” architecture to store massive amounts of information over multiple generations.

What many people may not realize is that Western Digital has established a presence as an object storage supplier for the Chinese market through a joint venture started two years ago with Unisplendour Corp. Ltd.

“We’re the No. 2 object storage platform in China according to IDC,” Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Data Center Systems at Western Digital, said Wednesday. “We’re fundamentally convinced … this is the strategic way to build a business in China.”

Asked during the gathering whether recent actions by the U.S. government surrounding trade policy with China were affecting the company’s business, Bullinger would only say that “there’s no immediate impact, but obviously we’re keeping an eye on it.”

Shipping 1 billion processor cores

Today the company also introduced four new IntelliFlash N Series systems. The Non-Volatile Memory express or NVMe flash arrays are designed for enterprise workloads involving artificial intelligence, machine learning and transactional applications.

What may not be so widely known is the volume of processors that Western Digital is shipping and its plans to transition into a new architecture. At the press event on Wednesday, Martin Fink, Western Digital’s chief technical officer, confirmed previous reports that the company is currently shipping more than 1 billion processor cores inside its products every year.

Fink also told the gathering that he expects that number to double in the near future and spoke at length about his company’s planned transition to RISC-V architecture.

Lead role in RISC-V

RISC-V is not exactly a household name. The instruction set technology is open-sourced and fairly new in development, entering the market only four years ago.

But RISC-V offers a simpler design and scalable compute architecture to enable big and fast data. Its foundation has the backing of a number of key players, including Google LLC, IBM Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Qualcomm Technologies Inc., in addition to Western Digital.

In November, Western Digital announced that it would take a lead role in the transition to RISC-V architecture. “We wanted to kickstart that ecosystem,” Fink said.

A third major announcement today involved the Ultrastar Serv60+8 Hybrid Storage Server platform (below). The high-capacity server is designed for the software-defined storage archive and can accept a number of technologies, including NVMe, for data acceleration.

ultrastar-serv608-front-2

Data as currency

Behind the hybrid server, flash array and object storage announcements is a fundamental belief on the part of Western Digital that information is being transformed from something that will not merely be stored and consumed, but bought and sold as a commodity.

Intelligent, tiered storage architectures that capture data at the edge and extend it to the cloud could play a major role in defining that value. Western Digital executives cite the example of farmers equipped with “internet of things” sensors that can capture metrics for soil moisture and temperature and sell that information to others.

“Now we’re seeing an environment where data is a form of currency,” Tang said. “The world has become a data-centric world.”

The world is also becoming more blockchain-centric and Western Digital is taking an interest in how the notion of a distributed ledger will factor into the data value equation. In a blog post released a few weeks ago, the company openly mused about a role for the blockchain in the “data gold rush” for IoT adopters.

In a separate interview, Tang confirmed the company’s interest in the blockchain without providing specifics. “We’re interested in blockchain because it enables more open access to data,” Tang explained. “We’re open to investment.”

In its quest to meet enterprise data needs across lifecycles and platforms, Western Digital has coined a term for its approach: Symbiotics Design. It’s what the company sees as the key role it can play in assimilating software, processing, interconnect and storage disciplines for enterprise customers. In the end, it’s all about the data.

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE

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