10 01732 759725 TECH BRIEFING For example, Western Digital’s high-density hard drives help store massive amounts of data reliably, cost-effectively and energy efficiently. They are designed for optimal power supporting a variety of workloads. High-Density Storage Platforms Storage platforms such as JBOD and JBOF, or ‘Just a Bunch of Disks’ and ‘Just a Bunch of Flash’, address the ever-expanding storage needs. Western Digital Ultrastar Data102 storage platform (JBOD) is configured with up to 102 HDDs in a compact and efficient form factor and offers up to 2.2PB1 of raw storage in 4U using the company’s 22TB1 CMR HDDs. One of the challenges of very dense storage enclosures is effective cooling. To address this requirement, in Western Digital JBODs, the enclosure is divided into two main zones, with rows of drives in the front and rows of drives in the back. The front zone is cooled conventionally with the air drawn in from the cold aisle, but the warmed air is then ducted around the sides of the rear zone directly to the hot aisle. For the rear zone, cold air is drawn straight from the cold aisle into the centre of the box and distributed through the rear drives, and to the exhaust on the hot aisle. In testing against a competitive enclosure, the Ultrastar Data102 storage platform required just over half the cooling power per drive slot to get the same average drive temperatures. To put this in perspective, in a large data centre with 20,000 drives, this could be as much as USD $300,000 in savings in energy costs.2 Innovations in enclosure design can pay great dividends in terms of cost, performance and reliability. Organisations are turning to data to create deep differentiations and the promise of data to unlock insights continues to hold. As a result, its value continues to grow. This translates into the need for better DC infrastructure so that the cost of capturing, storing and analysing data does not spiral out of control. The storage industry must continue to innovate and introduce cost-effective, highdensity and reliable solutions for the data centre market. www.westerndigital.com The most efficient data centres are focusing on increased density as a way to manage this growth while containing costs. Density comes in various forms in a DC. For example, there is high density in server deployments, which means compute nodes packed into smaller form factors to increase the number of servers per rack. Then there are highdensity hard drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) to help improve storage density or capacity per system. High-Density Drives As organisations move from merely creating and collecting data to driving actionable insights from it, the four Vs of big data are becoming more and more important: Volume, Velocity, Variety and, of course, Value. Today, gigantic amounts of data are integrated and analysed, regardless of their type, size or format, to unlock hitherto unseen trends, patterns or connections. More data equals better AI/ML training and smarter algorithms. This intensifies the need for a high-density storage infrastructure with purpose-built capabilities. The global data centre (DC) market is witnessing healthy growth, driven by the humongous amount of data that is being captured, stored, managed and analysed across industries. Consequently, DC infrastructure is also evolving at a rapid pace Density in Data Centre 1. 1GB = 1 billion bytes, 1TB = 1 trillion bytes, and 1PB = 1 quadrillion bytes. Actual user capacity may be less due to the operating environment. 2. Based on internal testing, assumptions and analysis using typical data centre efficiency and energy costs over a five-year system lifecycle.
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