Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that Western Digital (HGST) has been recognized as a Challenger in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage.

"Object storage adoption is rapidly expanding as companies look to not only preserve and protect data but increasingly derive greater strategic value from it through analytics and machine learning," said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Systems Business Unit, Western Digital. "The volume, velocity and variety of unstructured data generated today are dramatically challenging the scalability and efficiency of traditional data center architectures. Our ActiveScale™ object storage systems have proven to deliver outstanding scalability, performance and resiliency at unmatched TCO value in some of the largest and most challenging on-premises deployments in the industry.  By taking advantage of our easy-to-deploy ActiveScale object storage systems, our customers are shifting their focus from infrastructure to driving greater insight and value into their businesses."

Western Digital ActiveScale

Western Digital's ActiveScale system represents the next-generation of object storage for simplified data management and improved storage economics for managing petabyte-scale unstructured data growth. Enabling private or hybrid cloud environments, the ActiveScale system helps customers implement a "Data Forever" architecture that delivers seamless scalability and extreme data durability required for long-term data storage across generations of hardware and software technology. Its new Unified Data Access capabilities provide ingest and management of data in traditional file system format and for improving storage usage in environments with mixed file and object use cases.

With one of the largest, object-storage technology alliance partner ecosystems in the industry, Western Digital delivers innovation and flexibility to end users, providing integrated solutions that help simplify deployment and accelerate time to value.  Its comprehensive solution ecosystem, with leading and certified, independent software vendors (ISVs), target a variety of market segments, including healthcare/life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications and financial services. Use cases include data collaboration, data lakes, and digital repositories for media workflows, analytics, machine learning, IoT, and tape and legacy NAS consolidation in backup and archive workloads. 

Come visit Western Digital at the 2018 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, December 3-6 in Las Vegas (Booth #209). On Wednesday, December 5 at 9:15 am PT, join Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital's Data Center Systems business unit, as he will be sharing insights on "Creating the Next Generation of Data-Driven Infrastructure."

The ActiveScale system complements Western Digital's full data center portfolio, including ActiveScale, IntelliFlash™, OpenFlex™, Ultrastar® platforms, and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs. Now available, the ActiveScale family starts at 864TB¹ raw capacity and can scale to 63PB in a single namespace. For more information, visit: https://www.hgst.com/products/systems.

View a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage at: http://www.westerndigital.com/gartner-MQ-DFOS.

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, Julia Palmer | Raj Bala | John McArthur, 18 October 2018.

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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 marketed under the G-Technology™, HGST, SanDisk®, Tegile™, Upthere™, and WD® brands.

1 One terabyte (TB) equals one trillion bytes and one petabyte (PB) equals 1,000TB when referring to storage capacity. Usable capacity will vary from the raw capacity due to object storage methodologies and other factors.

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 ActiveScale product. 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.

© 2018 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, SanDisk, Tegile, Upthere, WD, ActiveScale, IntelliFlash, OpenFlex, and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.