Western Digital’s Data Center Systems Business Achieves Rapid Growth and Market Momentum as New Customers Transform Their Storage Infrastructure

Western Digital® Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), a leading data infrastructure company, today announced that its Data Center Systems (DCS) business continues to gain momentum with record growth and achievements, as enterprise and cloud-scale customers accelerate deployment of DCS solutions to meet the data infrastructure demands of a wide range of applications, including business-critical databases, decision-support systems, and real-time analytics. With a unique, vertically-integrated data infrastructure design, development, and manufacturing model – from silicon to systems – Western Digital's DCS delivers solutions with compelling performance and economic efficiency to help customers protect, mobilize, transform, and extract greater value from data within increasingly specialized environments in the data center.

Developments and Momentum Driving Growth:

• Shipping more than three exabytes of systems and platforms in 2018 and achieving 17x revenue growth since it was established in 2016

• Adding more than 150 new global customers per quarter including Doctors.net, Egan Company, NFON, NxtGen, RazorBlue, Safeway Insurance, Saudi Petroleum, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Wish.com, Biomedical Research Computing at the University of Oxford, and more

• Expanding global sales and marketing coverage in Europe, Middle East, India, and Japan

• Growing an award-winning Enterprise Partner Program  with more than 800 channel partners globally who receive incentives and gain access to a comprehensive selection of resources to help create solutions and services that target specific markets and customer needs while growing their business and maximizing profitability

• Leading the transformation to next-generation storage infrastructure with its IntelliFlash™ N-Series, one of the industry's first unified NVMe™ all-flash arrays, and laying the foundation for NVMe over Fabrics™ (NVMe-oF™) with its OpenFlex™ open composable Shared Accelerated Storage platform and architecture

• Increasing the cadence of product delivery across the entire Data Center Systems portfolio of storage platforms, NVMe systems, all-flash arrays, and object storage systems

• Accelerating software innovations in flash data management, data mobility, open composability, predictive data analytics, and cloud-based management with more than 400 research and development engineers

• Recognized as a Visionary in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays¹. Additionally, receiving  high ratings in the recent Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer': Solid-State Arrays² report for Western Digital IntelliFlash arrays

• Facilitating a "data forever" architecture with Western Digital ActiveScale object storage systems. Being recognized as a Challenger in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage³. Additionally, receiving high ratings in the recent Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer': Distributed File Systems and Object Storage⁴

• Partnering with more than 50 independent software vendors (ISVs), enabling integrated solutions that help simplify deployment and accelerate time-to-value for a variety of market segments, including e-commerce, healthcare/life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications, online-gaming and financial services.

"Western Digital's DCS group has become a key partner of ours, driven by its innovative storage systems and platforms, and its steadfast commitment to the channel," said Marco Mohajer, president at Technologent. "With their expanded team, high-touch model, and strong ISV alliances, we're working together to address new challenges and win new business for next-generation workloads driven by analytics, machine learning, IoT and more. We look forward to our continued relationship with DCS to help grow our business and explore new market opportunities."

"It is clear from IDC primary research that those enterprises undergoing digital transformation – that is, the evolution to business models that treat and leverage data as a strategic capital asset – are investing in new technologies to drive IT infrastructure modernization, including All-Flash Arrays, software-defined storage, and unstructured storage platforms, at rates that are 17 to 46 times that of the rate of organizations not pursuing digital transformation," said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC.  "Vendors like Western Digital who have innovative, competitive offerings in all these areas and are engaging with these more forward-looking companies are enjoying high revenue growth as a result."

"The continued, unabated growth of data and its strategic value is driving a transformation of IT infrastructures as never before," said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital's Data Center Systems business unit. "As data center customers face these new and relentless demands, they're looking to partner with a company they can trust with the capabilities, products and resources they need. Western Digital is that company. By applying our decades of data storage expertise and semiconductor memory intellectual property to holistically innovate from silicon to systems, we help our customers solve data infrastructure challenges in a way that no other vendor can. We are thrilled to be able to assist all of our valued customers in accelerating and protecting their digital ecosystems."

Read Phil's Blog: 4 Things You Didn't Know About Western Digital Data Center Systems

Western Digital's Data Center Systems Portfolio - Enabling Data Center Transformation

The Data Center Systems' portfolio addresses a wide range of on-premises and private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, as well as supporting 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. With heavier workloads demanding more compute resources than ever before, IT leaders are turning to Western Digital to help design, architect, and deploy high-performance, scalable and flexible data-centric infrastructures that deliver the performance, scalability, and peace of mind they are seeking for their businesses today and into the future.

• IntelliFlash N-Series, a unified NVMe all-flash array is a uniquely differentiated next-gen enterprise flash storage system that delivers exceptional performance and economics for data consolidation. The IntelliFlash NVMe array intelligently places fast data across multiple grades of flash storage media for maximum performance acceleration and consistent responsiveness. With an extensive set of data services including inline compression and deduplication, along with native support for SAN and NAS protocols, IntelliFlash arrays are deployed at thousands of customer sites worldwide to accelerate applications common in transaction processing, real-time analytics, databases, virtualization, and file services workloads.

• 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 1.4PB 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-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.  Enabling NVMe-oF, OpenFlex allows 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 will 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 innovationDCS business offers 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 the right solutions for their needs. Western Digital has primary operations in eight countries and has offices throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific, Japan, India Europe, and the Middle East.

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

¹ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, John Monroe, Joseph Unsworth, Santhosh Rao, 23 July 2018.
² Source: Gartner, "Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer': Solid-State Arrays," Peer Contributors, 23 January 2019.
³ Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, Julia Palmer, Raj Bala, John McArthur, 18 October 2018.
⁴ Source: Gartner, "Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer': Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, Peer Contributors, 7 March 2019

One TB equals one trillion bytes and one PB equals 1,000TB when referring to storage capacity. Usable capacity will vary from the raw capacity due to operating environment.

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, ActiveScale, IntelliFlash, OpenFlex, and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US 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 business unit 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.