Western Digital to provide strategic update at 2016 Investor Day

Western Digital, the storage technologies and solutions, will hold its Investor Day, where senior leadership will detail progress of the company’s ongoing transformation, strategy and business model to address unabated data growth with its unique and differentiated platform. The company will also demonstrate new flash- and disk-based technologies and products at the event, including a 12TB Helium HDD, high-performance SSDs for data center applications and a 256GB commercial microSD card using 3D NAND. The presentations will be webcast live and a recorded archive will be available beginning later in the day on December 6 at investor.wdc.com.

Western Digital has leveraged the strengths and resources of legacy HGST, SanDisk and WD to create a powerful platform for growth and long-term industry leadership. The strategic platform is aligned with the company’s vision for the continued, rapid expansion of the data ecosystem and the increasingly valuable role data plays for both businesses and consumers. With leading portfolio breadth and capabilities across the full spectrum of flash and disk-based technologies, Western Digital is uniquely positioned to deliver the possibilities of data. The company continues to drive leading innovation across the storage ecosystem, from advanced flash and HDD technologies to a broad spectrum of client devices and solutions, as well as powerful systems for cloud-scale data centers.

“We are pleased to host the investment community for a strategic update on our core business and growth opportunities, and for a discussion on how we continue transforming our capabilities to expand our strategic role in the storage ecosystem,” said Steve Milligan, CEO, Western Digital. “Western Digital has built a powerful strategic platform with growth drivers and unique competitive advantages that will allow us to expand the value we deliver to customers and strengthen our long-term leadership position in the storage industry.”

Today the company will reiterate that its transition to 3D NAND technology continues to progress as planned. SanDisk Edge, a commercial grade microSD card leveraging 3D NAND storage technology will be displayed at the event and is currently shipping to OEM customers worldwide in capacities up to 256GB. The card is designed for OEM use in surveillance and dash cameras, drones and other commercial applications requiring the higher capacities 3D NAND technology helps enable, and can store nearly 60 hours of Full HD video.

In a separate announcement, the company introduced new high-performance SSDs for the data center, as well as new HDD device capacities. Achieving random-read performance of up to 1.2 million IOPS, the HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 Series NVMe PCIe SSD, as well as the company’s fastest and highest capacity SAS SSD to date, the 7.68TB HGST-branded Ultrastar SS200 SAS SSD, are currently shipping to select OEM customers. For the capacity data center market, the company is now sampling its new, helium-filled 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 PMR hard drive with select cloud and hyperscale customers. In addition, the company will be extending its helium-based lineup with a 14TB model, which deploys Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology to achieve the new maximum capacity. The 14TB drive is currently being sampled with select customers. More than 12 million HelioSeal helium hard drives have been shipped to date.

Leveraging the company’s unique expertise in high-performance, high-capacity flash technologies, the company also revealed in a separate announcement a new, ultra-performance flash platform technology. For “fast data” cloud-scale applications and utilizing industry-standard NVMe SSDs connected to multiple servers via PCIe in a 2U rack, Western Digital has achieved 18 mn IOPS – the highest performance per rack unit in the industry. The company said this all-flash platform would be made available in the first half of calendar 2017.