Archive Expert SanDisk enhances cloud service

Over the past three to four years, SanDisk has been focused on creating enterprise storage solutions using Flash. Separately, Western Digital, three years ago acquired HGST. It was very focused on enterprise storage side using both flash and hard drives. On May 12, both companies merged to form a larger storage entity while retaining brands of HGST and SanDisk. In an interaction with The DQ Channels Vivek Tyagi, Director for India business development, SanDisk Commercial sales and Support at Western Digital Corporation talks about Active Archival Systems, a new addition to the portfolio.

What is ActiveScale

Combining the enterprise and data center business, we now have a new business unit called DCS or data center solutions business unit and this BU of Western Digital was launched on November 15. The company launched a new product which is basically for the active archival systems.

Object storage is basically a build-up of very large files or blocks. If you go to an e-commerce company and try to look for a product, you will typically see their pictures. Those pictures are not small files; they are a large collection of files. When you are archiving data in a variety of applications, where you need to keep the data for a long time, either due to a business requirement or government regulation, like in the media industry whatever programs are over, those videos need to be stored for a long time as you may want to access it later. But you may not access it every day, but maybe need it later. So, they archive their data in such industries. Similarly, in government, telecom, healthcare records are some of the other examples where data needs to be stored for a long time as per requirement. Historically, companies would store data on a magnetic tape, so you record the data on the tape and store the tape in a cupboard. Here, the problem is when you need to access the content. Even in video surveillance for example, if you put the old data on a tape when you need to access it, access from tape is extremely slow and a challenging process and is not always online.

So, WD has created the object archival storage which is based on the enterprise grade archives and it is also slightly different from the traditional way of selling hard drives, it is actually a full system.

The system consists of hard drive based storage, servers and basic networking within the box and the particular software for the archiving of data. The software is called Ampli Data. This was a company is Europe that WD- HGST has acquired three years ago and they claim to have one of the best reliability on data. This product is specifically designed for archival storage and object storage. It could be required in big data, healthcare, telecom and also by media and entertainment industry.

There is a massive increase in data and content, how is the  ActiveScale designed to manage this?

This product can be used by cloud service providers and is designed in a modular way. So, in a data center or cloud data center you typically have racks, this product is shipped with one rack and in one rack you can install multiple boxes of hard drive for storing data, this starts minimum at 500TB of usable data. Within the same rack, you can keep adding to the storage capacity and go up to 2 petabyte in one rack. Suppose one rack is full, you can add the second rack of 2 petabyte, third rack of 2 petabyte and you can go all the way up to 19 petabytes of storage in one data center. In that sense, it is highly scalable and that's why it is targeted more at the data center or cloud service providers.

The product we just launched is ActiveScale CM collects data from all of your Active Archive object storage systems and creates analytic reports to provide insights that allow you to better manage your environment. ActiveScale CM provides cloud-based capability that can map historical trends, utilization, and custom reports based on big data analytics that make it easy to identify conditions for pre-emptive action before a problem occurs.

So, when we sell this product we have a contract which includes service and warranty. We provide one to three years warranty and we have presence in multiple countries across the world. With the third party, we keep spares and we take care of installation service that is provided directly by WD and support and service is provided to customers in various locations.

Since this product is for archival, how would you define personal and professional data?

Suppose a cloud service provider is deploying it in his cloud service and then he would actually decide how to carve out services out of it for consumers or for company use. If they provide a service to another corporate then, typically the corporate will ask for certain services. This is more targeted towards a corporate because archival data for long time is usually a corporate requirement. If an individual wants to store data, they usually would put data on their smartphones. Smartphones these days be it Android or iOS, those companies are providing cloud data for the smartphone data.

How many customers do you have right now who are using the archival system?

This product was launched on November 15 in India - we do not have any customers right now to name. We are in discussions with some customers. Since, this is a bulky and expensive product, it takes at least six months that's the typical sales cycle. Globally, we do have customers because another version of this product was launched by HGST two years ago. With that first generation of product they already have many deployments around the world, but none at the moment in India.

What is commercial channel strategy for India?

In the commercial side, the fulfillment is through channels. In the enterprise, unless we meet the end customer and explain the product to them, there will not be any demand coming in as it is not a consumer product. Our GTM is mainly around two types of customers. From SanDisk and HGST enterprise, one is cloud service providers - both Indian and global because they deploy large amount of storage both flash and hard drive. Second type of customers are the e-commerce companies because their business needs large amounts of storage and the performance of storage system is critical to their business and they usually buy flash or hard drive and use open source software to build their infrastructure. In the last two years from SanDisk perspective, these two customers have been the focus, but now with the archival product coming in now, we are talking beyond these customers. We will be focusing on telecom, media and entertainment sector.

What are the top three trends in the commercial storage space? 

One key trend is that storage is moving from personal devices more towards the cloud. In the past, we were in the habit of storing our data in a USB or external hard drive, but now from the smartphone when storage is used up completely, we are now looking at cloud as a back-up. If you look at the commercial storage, the other trend is flash which is becoming more pervasive in the data center because in the past, flash prices were very high so people would make limited use of flash only when they really needed it for high performance and the rest of the data was on hard disk drive. But now flash is more widely available and the prices are reducing and in turn increasing its usage in the commercial storage or data center space.

Another trend is a lot of 'Do it Yourself' storage coming up on the enterprise front. This doesn't apply to all enterprises, but cloud service providers, all of them are not going with monolithic storage, but many of them are going with software defined storage. What it means is they can buy flash or hard drive from a company like us in bulk and they can use open source storage file systems and deploy it themselves in data center. It dramatically cuts down the costs.

What's the price of the archival system?

The easiest way to understand its price will be 20 US cents per gigabyte, if you are going with a terabyte, then it becomes $200 per terabyte and then accordingly depending on how many terabytes is deployed the cost can be calculated.

Can you provide an overview of the developments in SanDisk over the last 12-18 months?

In May, we merged with Western Digital and last two quarters we have seen an unprecedented demand for flash. There are number of trends fuelling it, one of them would be the new iPhone that got launched which has high memory capacities of 128 GB and 256 GB. This is in-turn setting a trend for other smartphone makers in different countries to look at increasing capacity in the phones. Overall demand for flash was fuelled by two sectors- smartphone sector and data centers. The market growth has been positive which has been a good sign for SanDisk.

What was the impact after the acquisition in terms of product integration and customer alignment?

The products are very complimentary and as such there is no overlap because Western Digital has more hard drive solutions and SanDisk has more flash based solutions. Customers have been using both flash and hard drive, so it’s been very complimentary and what customers assume is that the company has now become a one-stop shop for all their storage needs, be it on the commercial or personal storage side.

Also, with the launch of the Data Center Systems (DCS) unit, the DCS portfolio is continually evolving and includes both flash and disk-based offerings. Intelligent platforms are available with either all-flash or disk storage for customers who want to build their own software defined storage solution. For customers dealing with massive scale, the DCS object storage offerings represent a turn-key system solution. Nobody has the scale of offerings from devices, components, software, platforms, and systems found in Western Digital. The company has formed itself to take advantage of the different market opportunities.

What is the company roadmap for 2017 in terms of product?

For the next one year, traditionally both companies have sold more sub-systems or components, hard disk drives, flash drives or solid state drives, so this will continue to happen. We will continue to sell these devices, these devices are purchased more by channel for laptop/ desktop replacement of hard drive or flash or they are bought by large OEMs of computers. The next thing that we sell is more like a platform. So, WDC has a platform which is an enclosure filled with hard disk drives, it’s a higher level of value addition. SanDisk also has a similar enclosure called InfiniFlash. We have a variety of products coming up on the platforms, but the most exciting for us will be to see how both the companies will be moving up in the value chain, especially in the data center vertical. The company will also look at total systems solutions for the end customers. Many more products and platforms are envisioned for the next year from the new company.