Transforming Storage Industry with DCS Unit

We spoke to Vivek Tyagi, Director for India business development SanDisk commercial sales and support at Western Digital Corporation, about their acquisition of SanDisk and HGST that has created a new business unit called the data center systems solution and how the storage industry is transforming fast from it.

Western Digital Corporation, after the acquisition of SanDisk and HGST has created a new business center called the data center systems solution. This business unit is focused on significant platform, solution, and system-level opportunities which combines the engineering, management, and marketing resources to deal with enterprise and cloud-scale opportunities. The DCS portfolio is continually evolving and includes both flash and disk-based offerings.

“When we say component we refer to hard disk drive or solid state drive using selection of flat drives and hard drives. We build platforms known as JBOD (just a bunch of disks/drives). Now collecting those JBODs combining with server, software, and networking, a total solution is built. We launched a new entry-level active archival system called ActiveScale P100 focused on addressing cloud-scale challenges,” said Vivek Tyagi, Director for India business development SanDisk commercial sales and support at Western Digital Corporation.

How the Storage Landscape is Transforming and in a Rapid Change

“The storage industry is in a state of change and traditional storage is giving way to more innovative approaches such as software-defined storage because no one solution fits every need,” said Tyagi. One significant change is the amount of data generated is massive. In the past when a particular company is creating such as a database of employees, it was all structured data. They would decide the necessary data field like name, employee code etc, and hence the data was very structured. It was easy to handle the data.

“Today if you consider e-commerce companies - all the data being generated on their website is extremely unstructured. The challenges they face are firstly the volume of data is large and secondly a large part of that data is unstructured. When this huge amount of unstructured data is dumped somewhere and then later you have to run a query to find out some information it becomes very difficult. These are some of the significant changes taking place in the storage industry,” added Tyagi.

The Benefits of DCS Unit

The Data Center Systems business unit is one tangible indication of the integration of HGST CIBU and SanDisk EMS legacy organizations brought together to better address business opportunities in the enterprise and cloud markets. The component and device portions of HGST and SanDisk have been moved to other business units in Western Digital to allow DCS to focus on enterprise and cloud opportunities. “The combination of the different groups in Western Digital provides our customers a wide portfolio of storage options from the world’s largest storage vendor,” said Tyagi

The solutions are coming at three different levels. First level is at the component level. Basically WDC continues to make hard drives and HGST makes special category of hard drives for data center and enterprise and SanDisk makes solid state drives with flash. “Now at one level we have the hard drive as well as solid state drives for data center application. There is a category of customers which buy this like e-commerce they will prefer to buy these subsystems. They are more in the Do It Yourself concept, they will put in the server and develop some software around it and use it themselves,” said Tyagi.

The second level is HGST and WDC had made a box full of hard drives, called JBOD (just a bunch of disks). So instead of buying lose hard drives and installing it into a storage system or server system it will involve a lot of integration work. So they decided to move one level up the value chain and they made a JBOD of hard drives and at the same time SanDisk had made a JBOD of flash drives.

The third level is the extended range. On November, WDC announced the launch of a new product called the ActiveScale P100. The product is box filled with hard drive, in which server and intelligent archival software is added. The complete product is available now for data center for the archival application.