When it comes to data centres, both traditional and cloud-oriented, the hard drive technology supporting the data is essential.
So says Kalvin Subbadu, components sales manager for SA at WD, who notes that organisations should choose the right framework to form the foundation of a data-driven enterprise that will ensure optimal performance and efficiency from the technology that supports the business.
Subbadu believes that the demands of running a data centre, the requirement for maximum uptime and the nature of the cloud has driven the importance of hard drive technology in business.
According to The Uptime Institute's Data Centre Industry Survey 2013, data centre budgets in the US are on the rise and public cloud service adoption has seen impressive growth - leading to increased storage capacity within the enterprise.
Although public cloud service adoption in SA has not been as extensive, it is on the rise, and in a digital world, data remains the most important asset of any business, says Subbadu.
Therefore, organisations in SA should invest in the appropriate hard drive technology to support data storage, cloud and business application to remain competitive and relevant, he adds.
As data centres evolve in response to the explosive growth of unstructured data, the requirements from an enterprise-class hard drive need to be extended to support scale-out architectures, notes Subbadu.
He points out that hard drives used in a data centres should be built to run in always-on environments.
Also, they need to maintain maximum performance and data integrity within complex systems running massive scale applications, he adds.
"From multiple processors and redundant power supplies to specialised storage devices and robust interfaces such as serial attached storage, data centres demand the highest quality and most reliable components to ensure maximum uptime, expandability, and data integrity," says Subbadu.
He points out that the various tiers of storage need to create the right balance of reliability, workload capability, performance, capacity and cost per gigabyte to deliver optimal data centre storage.
However, organisations need to remember that data centre requirements are not homogenous.
For demanding applications such as virtualised servers, a hard drive must be able to handle heavy workloads with best-in-class reliability and solid performance otherwise hard drives used in such applications will cause significant performance problems, slowing the ability of a business to perform core functions, says Subbadu.
When it comes to bulk cloud storage, scalability is key and the right combination of capacity, reliability and workload capacity for such scale-out architectures is vital, he concludes.
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