Western Digital Expands Its Data Center Systems Portfolio Into Japan

Western Digital® Corp., a leading data infrastructure company, today announced that its family of IntelliFlash™ NVMe™ all-flash arrays and hybrid flash arrays are now available in Japan through the company's channel partner network. This market expansion adds to Western Digital's Data Center Systems (DCS) group's steady growth and momentum as it delivers innovative and vertically integrated solutions — from silicon to systems — helping customers worldwide to protect, mobilize, transform, and extract the full value of their data. The IntelliFlash family further strengthens Western Digital's position in the market and adds to DCS' growing portfolio of ActiveScale™ object storage systems, OpenFlex™ NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) composable infrastructure, and its family of Ultrastar® storage servers and platforms.

As part of its commitment to the market, Western Digital has focused a dedicated regional sales team, as well as customer support and field systems engineers, on a growing number of enterprises looking to benefit from next-generation storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and cloud-scale workloads—from virtualization and database application acceleration to data-intensive applications for real-time transactions, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data analytics.

IntelliFlash NVMe, All-flash Array, and Hybrid Flash Family
Western Digital's IntelliFlash family provides turnkey solutions for customers seeking the combination of high performance, massive data consolidation, built-in disaster prevention, and simplified data management. The family includes one of the first unified, NVMe flash arrays, the IntelliFlash N-Series, which leverages the speed and efficiency of NVMe to deliver up to 3x the performance of non-NVMe all-flash arrays, with latency as low as 200 microseconds. All IntelliFlash arrays place fast data across multiple grades of flash storage media for maximum performance acceleration and consistent responsiveness. With an extensive set of data services powered by IntelliFlash OS 3.9, including inline compression and deduplication, along with native support for SAN and NAS protocols, IntelliFlash arrays have been deployed at thousands of customer sites worldwide to accelerate applications common in transaction processing, real-time analytics, databases, virtualization, and file services workloads. The IntelliFlash family comes in a range of effective capacity points up to 1.3PB^1,2.

"With growing application demands and the sheer volume of data sets and data types – and their associated business workloads such as big data analytics and AI/ML – customers are coming to us looking for a single vendor that can offer full-spectrum storage systems and solutions with the right value, performance and economics for their workloads," said Michiaki Kono, senior director of DCS/enterprise business in Japan for Western Digital. "We're thrilled to share the news of the introduction of IntelliFlash to our local customers, along with welcoming a fully dedicated enterprise sales team to help our customers deploy next-gen infrastructures that support their business needs for today and into the future".

With several thousand IntelliFlash customers around the world, Western Digital has been recognized by Gartner as a "Visionary" in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays³ and has received extremely high ratings in peer reviews in the recent Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer': Solid-State Arrays report for Western Digital IntelliFlash arrays⁴.

Western Digital's Data Center Systems Portfolio
With the addition of the IntelliFlash family, Western Digital's Data Center Systems Portfolio supports a wide range of on-premises and private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, as well as varied applications and workloads, including real-time AI/ML, big data analytics, virtualized enterprise applications, high-performance databases and high-density geo-dispersed cloud-scale repositories, to name a few. Complementary DCS solutions include:

• ActiveScale petabyte-scale, hybrid-cloud object storage system provides a cost-effective, scalable solution for unprecedented unstructured data growth and facilitates a data-forever architecture. S3-compatible, the ActiveScale system delivers elastic scaling (up and out), extreme data durability (up to 19 nines), and single-plane-of-glass management, making it an easy and economical choice to store all types of unstructured big data.

• Ultrastar software-defined storage (SDS) storage servers and platforms are a family of all-flash, hybrid and disk storage platforms that are a key element of next-gen disaggregated storage and SDS systems, delivering high density and the flexibility to balance performance with cost. This family provides up to 1.4PB2 of raw storage in a compact and efficient form factor. All Ultrastar platforms support up to 24 SSDs in a hybrid configuration, enabling a high-performance storage tier for demanding applications.

• OpenFlex NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) open composable infrastructure will enable the transformation of data centers into next-generation highly scalable and flexible environments to effectively address the diverse applications and complex data workflows of today's business. OpenFlex enables organizations to compose virtual storage systems from shared pools of data center resources, incorporating disk, flash, and compute via an Open Composable API. A key innovation is enabling disk-based resources to share the same fabric and protocol as flash-based storage, offering flexibility and value. Virtual systems can now be composed while balancing SLAs against cost demands. OpenFlex can save up to 40% of TCO over conventional hyper-converged infrastructure approaches.

Leveraging more than 40 years of experience and innovation in the HDD and flash memory businessoffers deep knowledge of data's transformational impact on business and society and works closely with customers to develop full understanding of specific objectives and opportunities to deliver reliable, vertically integrated solutions to meet their needs from edge to core. Western Digital has primary operations in eight countries and has offices throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, India, Japan, and the Middle East.

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Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

¹ Based on 5:1 data reduction ratio and data protection methodology. 
² One TB equals one trillion bytes and one PB equals 1,000TB when referring to storage capacity. Usable capacity will vary due to operating environment, variable compression, and data protection methodologies.
³ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, John Monroe, Joseph Unsworth, Santhosh Rao, 23 July 2018.
⁴ Source: Gartner, "Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer': Solid-State Arrays," Peer Contributors, 23 January 2019.

About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. The company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data. Western Digital® data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, Upthere™ and WD® brands.

© 2019 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, SanDisk, Upthere, WD, ActiveScale, IntelliFlash, OpenFlex, and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. The NVMe and NVMe-oF word marks are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change without notice. Not all products are available in all regions of the world.

Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the applications, benefits, capabilities, features and performance of Western Digital's Data Center System products and data storage trends. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: volatility in global economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance and cost of commodity materials and specialized product components; actions by competitors; unexpected advances in competing technologies; our development and introduction of products based on new technologies and expansion into new data storage markets; risks associated with acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recently filed periodic report to which your attention is directed. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances change after the date of this release.