Western Digital Presents at Storage Field Day 19

50 Years of HDD and Flash Innovation from Western Digital

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Yusuf Jamal, Senior Vice President, Devices and Platforms, introduces Western Digital’s presentation at Storage Field Day 19. He gives a retrospective look at 50 years of HDD and flash storage innovation from the company, and how this is enabling the transformation and value of data from edge to core in the zettabyte age.

Personnel: Yusuf Jamal

Next-Level Gaming with Western Digital Black Performance-Driven NVMe SSDs

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Eric Spanneut, Vice President, Client Computing, presents Western Digital’s Black series NVMe SSDs. He talks about extreme NVMe storage, purpose-built for the performance and capacity demands of the growing gaming market. He is joined by Leah Schoeb, Senior Development Manager for AMD, who points out the factors driving extreme storage performance demand.

Personnel: Eric Spanneut, Leah Schoeb

The Impact of 5G and Edge Computing on Smart Video Recording with Western Digital

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Stefaan Vervaet, Senior Director, Smart Video Segment, Client Computing at Western Digital, presents the impact of 5G and edge computing on smart video. He begins by presenting the growth of video data worldwide, with 120 million cameras generating 37 exabytes of data in 2019. Western Digital positions the purple series of storage media to address the health, fleet, smart city, security, and smart factory markets. AI and video data is driving growth in edge computing and the demand for specialized storage.

Personnel: Stefaan Vervaet

Enabling Automotive, Mobile, and Emerging End Points with Western Digital

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Huibert Verhoeven, Senior Vice President, Automotive, Mobile, and Emerging (AME) at Western Digital presents new use end point demands for storage. Data is exploding in automotive, mobile, and IoT/Industrial environments and diversified storage solutions are needed. With 5G enabling literally billions of devices to be. connected in coming years, new challenges appear. One critical element is storage performance. UFS 3.0 and SmartSLC is required to meet the. performance demands of 5G endpoints. As smartphones and autonomous vehicles process data locally, they will need high-performance and high-capacity storage.

Personnel: Huibert Verhoeven

Solving the Data Dilemma with Data Center HDDs from Western Digital

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Phil Bullinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Business Unit, discusses Western Digital’s approach to enable zettabyte scale data. There is an enormous business opportunity to support digital data at scale, especially when it comes to IoT data. If TCO drives data center decisions, technologies that reduce overall costs can affect more than storage. Although use of SSDs is growing rapidly in the datacenter, hard disk drives still remain relevant, enabling “storage at scale.” High-capacity HDDs drive lower TCO, so Western Digital is investing in technologies to enable greater capacity. Helium-filled drives, energy assist, new suspension mechanics, SMR, and advanced queue management are needed and are all part of the company’s IP portfolio.

Personnel: Phil Bullinger

Western Digital Innovation Through Zoned Storage

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Swapna Yasarapu, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Data Center Business Unit, presents Western Digital’s approach to intelligently placing data with zoned storage. This includes both SMR for hard disk drives and ZNS for SSDs and is based on industry standards.

Personnel: Swapna Yasarapu

Continuing Hard Disk Drive Innovation from Western Digital

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Carl Che, Ph.D., Vice President, HDD Technology, discusses Western Digital’s continuous innovation in hard disk drive technology. The company is driving capacity and efficiency with mechanical innovation, new firmware and features, and increases in areal density. Energy-assisted recording technologies are emerging, including ePMR, MAMR, and HAMR, enabling capacity to 50 TB and beyond. New suspension technologies are emerging, including mual-stage and triple-stage actuators to increase tracks per inch. SMR is enabling areal density, but IOPS per TB are dropping. Multi-actuator drives can help maintain usability of hard disks for years to come.

Personnel: Carl Che

Enabling New Markets Through Flash Storage Innovation with Western Digital

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Luca Fasoli, Ph.D., Vice President, Memory Product Solutions, discusses Western Digital’s continuing innovation in flash storage technology. Demand for flash storage capacity is driving scale, with 23% CAGR expected from 2018 through 2023. Meeting this demand requires vertical scaling, lateral scaling through process innovations, and logical scaling to increase bits per cell. Each of these requires system and workload optimization, and Western Digital is promoting integrated storage technologies.

Personnel: Luca Fasoli

Western Digital Open Composability Accelerates the Future of Data Infrastructure

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Scott Hamilton, Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing, Data Center Platforms Business Unit, discusses the need for open composability in future enterprise IT infrastructure. As we near zettabyte scale, shared-nothing models strand resources, lack of agility leads to SKU explosion, and new use cases move GPUs to the data. Composable infrastructure is the answer, and NVMe over Fabrics provides the solution. Western Digital is supporting composability through OpenFlex and Open Composable API, and the Kazan Networks acquisition accelerates NVME-oF as a building block. The Open Composable ecosystem now includes Western Digital, Kaminario, Liqid, and DriveScale, along with Xilinx, Eideticom, Mellanox, Arista, and Broadcom.

Personnel: Scott Hamilton

Open Everything: Driving Open Standards and Open Source at Western Digital

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Richard New, Ph.D., Vice President of Research, discusses Western Digital’s approach to open standards and open source. Since storage performance and TCO are increasingly determined by system design, Western Digital is working with other companies and projects to drive open standards. The company is working to implement Zoned Storage in the Linux storage software stack, enabling improvements for both HDD and SSD. Western Digital is also working to develop and promote the RISC-V open instruction set architecture, a broad industry initiative with more than 150 member companies. The CHIPS Alliance is working to develop open hardware for interfaces, processors, and systems, including the SweRV CPU core. Western Digital is also a founding partner of OpenTitan, an open source project developing silicon root of trust chips. OmniXtend is a low-cost open-source hardware reference design for large shared-memory systems.

Personnel: Richard New