Western Digital, Dropbox Partner to Boost Cloud Infrastructure

By Nosa Alekhuogie

The Western Digital Corp (WDC) and Dropbox Inc. (DBX) have introduced a platform that will accelerate cloud infrastructure.

With Western Digital SMR HDDs serving as the storage foundation for its custom-built, multi-exabyte storage platforms, Dropbox will continue its strategic path, taking advantage of the highest storage densities with the lowest TCO without sacrificing data durability and availability for its over 600 million online customers.

Announcing the partnership, Vice President, Engineering at Dropbox, Andrew Fong, said: “Online tools and services are more important than ever before, so we need to be able to quickly innovate, expand functionality and scale to help stay competitive. We look forward to deploying these higher capacity 20TB SMR hard drives to further our cost savings and to provide our customers with even more value.

“Western Digital is an important strategic partner and we look forward to continuously pushing cloud infrastructure boundaries together.

“We’ve been working with Western Digital for many years, and throughout several phases of our storage platform development,” Fong further said.

Vice President of Enterprise Hard Drives at Dropbox, Andrew Dorian, said: “Dropbox was a pioneer in adopting SMR at scale, and their commitment has definitely paid off, giving them an early mover advantage by enabling rapid development of the highest capacity HDDs in the industry into their cloud infrastructure.”

“We are pleased to continue our long-term partnership with Dropbox to help them scale and capitalise on the growing customer demand for cloud services, online storage and remote collaboration tools.”

As the industry’s first 20TB HDDs, the Ultrastar DC HC650 delivers unmatched TCO for scale-out enterprise and cloud data centers through increased storage density and improved power efficiency. Featuring the highest capacity in the industry, cloud and enterprise customers recognise the benefits of SMR HDDs and are adopting the technology to contend with the massive growth in data.

“When considering exabyte-scale needs, and associated capital and operating cost of the data center, the long-term value in terms of lower cost-per-TB, higher density, low power and high reliability can help benefit the bottom line, they said.

“Several complementary technology innovations are featured in the Ultrastar DC HC650, including the industry’s first energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) implementation, the industry’s first triple-stage actuator and the fifth generation of HelioSeal technology.

Western Digital SMR HDDs are also an integral part of Zoned Storage, an open-source, standards-based initiative building upon the synergies of SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs that enables data centres to scale efficiently.”