Western Digital launched Zoned Storage

With a focus on enabling purpose-built, open and scalable data center architectures, Western Digital today launched Zoned Storage, an initiative that brings together new innovations and industry standards for cloud and hyperscale data center architects to design efficient storage tiers that help maintain competitive TCO and achieve greater economies of scale as we approach the zettabyte-scale era.

By 2023 and beyond, enterprises, machines, industries, consumers, science and more will be generating 103 zettabytes per year, according to IDC*. For this next-generation of data, new data center constructs, such as composable disaggregated infrastructure, are needed as today’s general-purpose architectures are inefficient and can carry resource and cost overhead when faced with an increasing span of workloads, applications and datasets. As more and more of this data will be sequential in nature – video, IoT/edge data, surveillance, or data that can be grouped or “zoned” into larger chunks such as large AI/ML datasets – there are opportunities to organize workloads for better performance and efficiencies with lower TCO by accelerating the adoption of zoned storage devices.

The Zoned Storage architecture enables applications, host and storage to orchestrate data placement and take full advantage of the highest available storage capacities typically with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs and the emerging zoned namespaces (ZNS) standard for NVMe SSDs to deliver better endurance and predictable, low-latency QoS performance. A planned extension of the NVMe standard, ZNS complements SMR technology, enabling developers to take advantage of both SMR and ZNS under a single storage stack, regardless of media type. With 50 percent of Western Digital’s HDD exabyte shipments expected to be on SMR by 2023, customers will be able to leverage their SMR application development to encompass high-capacity ZNS SSDs. Delivering intelligence to application architectures, SMR and ZNS will be key foundational building blocks of the new zettabyte-scale era now and into the future.

Highlights:

• The Zoned Storage initiative brings together tools and resources, leveraging advantages of zone block management, for architecting a robust, efficient and purpose-built storage tier to achieve competitive TCO now and into the future.
• A new developer site, hosted by Western Digital on ZonedStorage.io, includes open-source, standards-based tools and resources for ZNS and SMR.
• SMR areal density growth rate tracks closely with global data demand growth. Western Digital demonstrates 20TB with expected shipment in 2020. Western Digital estimates that 50 percent of its HDD exabytes shipped will be on SMR by 2023.

Read Full Press Release at Western Digital