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Western
Digital enters enterprise storage market
Posted: 18 February 2003
Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Western Digital
Corp. (NYSE: WDC) announced today it is entering the enterprise
hard drive market with an Enterprise Serial ATA (ESATA) product
called WD Raptor. The new hard drive offers systems builders and
storage vendors enterprise-class specifications: 1.2 million hours
MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), 10,000 RPM, 5.2 milliseconds (ms)
average seek time and a five-year warranty.
"Over the last three years, Western Digital’s business
has progressed significantly,” said Arif Shakeel, president
and COO for Western Digital.
"Our entrance into the enterprise market marks the next step
in our growth. With this announcement, Western Digital extends beyond
our consistently profitable desktop market, and brings unique Western
Digital know-how to the enterprise market. With exploding growth
predicted, Western Digital is poised to continue to be an important
player in the core of the rapidly growing storage marketplace."
According to IDC, an industry analyst firm, average year-over-year
storage growth between 2002 and 2006 will be 46 per cent, with a
gradual increase to about 60 per cent in 2006. At the same time,
storage industry experts, including IDC, expect average IT budgets
to grow at relatively slow rates – single-digit percentages
year-over-year. As a result, many organizations are looking for
innovative ways to increase storage at minimal cost.
Serial ATA (SATA) is a new interface technology that offers storage
providers and customers the critical reliability, availability,
scalability and performance attributes that enterprise environments
demand. Combined with a SATA interface, Western Digital designed
a new, enterprise-class mechanical platform for the WD Raptor hard
drive to meet the 24x7 demands of the enterprise environment.
With its WD Raptor, Western Digital applies its high-volume design
and manufacturing principles and economies of scale from its ATA
business to an enterprise-class platform. The result is an ESATA
hard drive with a significant cost advantage over SCSI devices.
In storage systems, hard drives typically represent the greatest
cost. The WD Raptor hard drive enables storage vendors and systems
builders, from large to small, to minimize their customers’
storage hardware costs, while not sacrificing reliability, data
integrity or performance.
"Never before have enterprise storage vendors, systems builders
and users been able to take advantage of the high-volume, low-cost
benefits of ATA technology and the reliability and performance of
an enterprise-class platform," said John Donovan, vice president
of TrendFOCUS, an industry analyst firm.
"TrendFOCUS estimates that currently ATA storage accounts
for more than 10 percent of the enterprise market. SATA will replace
a growing percentage of SCSI drives in the enterprise market. Combining
SATA, 10,000 RPM and enterprise mechanics, Western Digital’s
WD Raptor will be a strong enterprise contender," added Donovan.
SATA offers system-level benefits in the enterprise environment,
including point-to-point configuration, which utilizes the full
bandwidth of each drive interface in a networked environment; scalability;
hot-plug support for system design flexibility; and advanced error
detection for data integrity.
"The WD Raptor SATA drive represents a significant milestone
for enterprise storage,” said Barbara Murphy, vice president
of marketing at 3ware, which offers SATA RAID (redundant array independent
disk) controllers.
"WD is delivering enterprise-class reliability and performance
at a hugely attractive price point, enabling the economical deployment
of RAID redundancy across the entire corporate data set."
Expected to be shipping later this month, the WD Raptor hard drive
is expected to sell for approximately 30 percent less than competing
SCSI hard drives. Initially, the hard drive will be available in
a 36 GB capacity. In addition to its 5.2 ms average seek time, 10,000
RPM,
1.2 million hours MTBF and five-year warranty, data throughput is
150 MB/second from the SATA interface. The performance roadmap for
SATA extends up to 600 MB/second, ensuring a reliable standard for
storage providers and customers in the years ahead.
Western Digital, one of the storage industry’s pioneers and
long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and
organizations that collect, manage and use digital information.
The Company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that
keep users’ data close-at-hand and secure from loss. Western
Digital was founded in 1970. The Company's storage products are
marketed to leading systems manufacturers and selected resellers
under the Western Digital brand name. Visit the Investor section
of the Company’s Web site (www.westerndigital.com) to access
a variety of financial and investor information.
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