Western Digital brings ‘world’s first’ 22TB CMR hard drive to India

Storage solution provider Western Digital has announced that it has begun shipping its new 22TB CMR (conventional magnetic recording ) hard disk drives (HDD) in India as it looks to expand business in the country amid exponential increase in data generation.

“We are living in the Zettabyte era today and creating massive amounts of data. Our newly introduced 22TB drives will help our customers – cloud service providers and enterprises, to efficiently store and access huge volumes of data while offering cost efficiencies and low total cost of ownership at scale,” Jaganathan Chelliah, Senior Director – Marketing, India, Middle East & TIA, Western Digital, said.

He added that this launch is rightly timed for the Indian market as the country is witnessing massive data growth and therefore data center expansion. Additionally, the expected rollout of 5G services will further amplify data and cloud usage to create huge demand for high-capacity drives that help reduce total cost of ownership, Mr. Chelliah said.

As per ICRA report, the Indian data centre industry’s capacity is expected to witness a five-fold increase in the next five years. Currently, the industry is pegged at $5.6 billion and 45 new data centres are expected to come up by 2025.

According to Western Digital, reducing total cost of ownership is a primary driver when it comes to a cost-benefit analysis of storage solutions and is the reason cloud architects continue to use HDDs as the primary workhorse for enterprise data centres. HDDs, as per the company, currently dominate the market as they offer the lowest cost per terabyte based on a combination of factors including price, cost, capacity, power, performance, reliability and data retention.

It is estimated that as individual HDD capacity increases, the total cost of ownership improves for the customer by 17%-20%.