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Western Digital has expanded its portfolio of datacenter hard drives: Khwaja Saifuddin

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Onkar Sharma
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Khwaja Saifuddin Senior Sales Director – South Asia Middle East and Africa Western Digital

In an interaction with Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Sales Director – South Asia, Middle East and Africa, Western Digital, Dataquest finds out how Western Digital is expanding its presence in India's burgeoning data center storage market. Excerpts from the interview:

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What is WD's strategy behind portfolio expansion with a new line of products?

Western Digital has expanded its portfolio of datacenter hard drives with the introduction of WD Gold - a new brand of WD hard drives targeted at enterprise and datacentre applications, adding new capacities and employing new technologies that ultimately expand the choices of WD datacentre products for system integrators, system architects, and IT managers.

WD Gold is an important part of the colour portfolio strategy and reinstates our commitment in creating optimized drives for the markets we serve. We believe in delivering the most competitive and reliable solutions on the market.

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Who will be WD Gold datacenter hard drive potential consumers and how will it benefit them?

Western Digital newly introduced WD Gold is targeted at enterprise and datacenter applications, adding new capacities and employing new technologies that ultimately expand the choices of WD datacenter products for system integrators, system architects, and IT managers.

WD Gold is intended for all enterprise and datacenter server and storage systems, and is offered as a “new and improved” follow-on to WD Re. New technology enables improved capabilities and higher capacities, boosting value to customers and ultimately delivering improved TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) through better performance, lower power consumption, higher reliability and higher capacities.

WD Gold Datacenter hard drives provide the following benefits to our customers:

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Improved power efficiency - New electronics enhance power efficiency up to 15 percent1. HelioSeal technology enables up to 26 percent lower power consumption.

Better performance – Up to 18 percent sequential performance improvement over previous generation WD Re 4TB datacenter drives. Up to 30 percent improvement in random write performance over previous generation WD Re 6TB datacenter drives through media-based cache, and up to 3x improvement over non-Western Digital competitive offerings.

High reliability – WD Gold incorporates best-of-breed design, manufacturing and test processes to achieve one of the highest reliability ratings in the industry – 2.5 million hours MTBF (8TB offering)

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With up to ten times the workload capacity of desktop drives, WD Gold hard drives employ advanced technology to deliver among the best in reliability, capacity, power efficiency and performance. From entry-level servers to high end enterprise storage systems, WD Gold hard drives offer the capacities required for the most demanding datacenter environments.

How this is newly introduced product range differentiated from the other products available in the market?

With the further integration of operations and engineering within Western Digital Corporation, WD Gold drives are able to leverage a broader portfolio of shared technology created by our company. These shared technologies may include but not be limited to mechanical, electronics, and firmware. We have specialized storage solutions just for specific needs. Similarly, we have datacentre components that go into building efficient datacentres such as WD Gold datacenter hard drives which addresses the need of enterprise / datacenter markets.

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We try to differentiate ourselves by focusing on research to develop and offer solutions that best meet the evolving requirements of our customers. This approach allows us to develop the most suitable products and solutions that add value to our consumers. We pride ourselves in offering really commendable after-sales and replacement services. These aspects naturally create differentiation.

What are the major storage trends shaping up the datacenter space?

According to Gartner, the value of the Indian data center infrastructure and solutions market will show a 5.2 percent increase year-on-year, totalling $2 billion in 2016. The research firm also believes that this segment will also be the fastest growing market, as spending is forecasted to increase 5.9 percent in 2016. With increased focus on mobility and big data activities in India and exceptional demand of data storage, storage market in India will also grow at a significant pace while the network storage will have the highest adoption rate amongst Indian enterprises.

We at WD ensure that the next generation technology and solution in the datacenter space caters to the different needs through customization. Products such as WD Gold datacenter hard drive will best fit the capacities and work load capabilities required for the most demanding datacenter environments as it is designed for a multitude of Datacenter-specific applications offering reliability, utility and more robust performance.

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