Western Digital Tunes up ActiveScale Object Storage Arrays

Western Digital Tunes up ActiveScale

Western Digital Corporation announced new features in its data center solution portfolio. That gives customers the flexibility to design modern infrastructure and capture greater value from their data, further expanding their value, innovation and entry into the data center market.

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This broad portfolio provides building blocks for rapid deployment data center solutions for better performance, efficiency and TCO, while opening up opportunities to capture, retain, access and transform data in ways never before possible.

Western Digital delivers new data center innovations. The data center is making big changes from the driven sheer volume, speed, various data, the edge to its core to attempt to seek innovative methods in push for growth. At the same time, it will manage flat IT budgets.

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With the advancement of the Internet of Things, machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics, new applications and use cases are emerging, and IT managers must design for the future.

The new solution includes ActiveScale 5.3 object storage system, an all-flash array that extends to the IntelliFlashTM N family of families, and the new Ultrastar Serv60 + 8 hybrid storage server platform.

Western Digital also features the IntelliFlash HD2000 family of high-density flash arrays, T4000 all-flash and hybrid flash/disk arrays. It is a fairly complex product series.

NVMe Drive Support Arrays are competing with strong competitors -like Dell EMC (PowerMax, Unity, XtremIO), Hitachi, HPE (3PAR and Nimble), Huawei, IBM (FlashSystem), Kaminario, Pure Storage, and the newer NVMe-over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) suppliers such as Aperion, E8, Excelero, Pavilion and Vexata.

In general, they all have deduplication and compression, file and block access, cloud monitoring and prediction, snapshots, replication, encryption and other functions. The established vendors are implementing plans to add NVMe-oF access to reduce access latency to the same sub-millisecond area as startups.

Western Digital, together with other categories in the IDC All Flash Array market share ranking is included in the list, while Kaminario has a 7.5% market share.

Comment on Western Digital ActiveScale

Western Digital tunes up ActiveScale object storage arrays, adding a larger disk and faster operating system. There’s no doubt that Western Digital has an extensive portfolio of disk arrays, but it does not seem to be a market leader in any category, nor is it a major player.

In a world where software-defined storage plays an important role, it is a hardware-only or integrated hardware/software array vendor.

Western Digital is very serious about the storage array system business. It updated the IntelliFlash primary storage array and has now refreshed ActiveScale.

Just like the mainstream system player, Western Digital has its own ActiveScale internal product. It’s true for DNN -its WOS product complements HPC, Nexenta and Tintri storage services.

Independent object storage vendors like Caringo, Cloudian and Scality are facing a mature market focused on S3 and file access protocols. Their task is to enhance their differentiation because general objects are stored commercially under S3 and file access.

It is probably that HPE will help one of them by discussing an acquisition proposal.