Today Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced enhancements to its ActiveScale storage system portfolio. Western Digital offers a range of products under the ActiveScale name, all related to long term data storage. Two of the three products under the ActiveScale name are the ActiveScale P100 appliance and the ActiveScale X100 hybrid cloud solution. Both the P100 and X100 run on the confusingly named ActiveScale Operating System (OS). Not only is the ActiveScale OS being upgraded to version 5.5, but WD also is adding the option of having 14TB drives in both products.
Western Digital is talking up two prominent new features with their software updates. The first is related to its Data Pipeline Service. The ActiveScale Data Pipeline Service stitches together distributed web-scale applications to streamline data processing. New in today's updates is support for real-time object notifications from ActiveScale Data Pipeline Service. WD thinks the new notification feature will simplify workflow processing for a variety of use cases, including real-time analytics, IoT, mobile applications, media and entertainment, and business processes. The second new software feature is an improvement to ActiveScale's existing Geo-Spreading feature. Geo-Spreading, as implemented by WD in ActiveScale, is a data protection scheme that spreads data across geographically dispersed availability zones. Dispersing data geographically reduces the risks posed by localized disasters or outages. The new OS 5.5 adds asynchronous mode support to ActiveScale Geo-Spreading. WD claims asynchronous mode enables low-latency data to ingest for IoT applications without compromising system availability. Customers can now choose between synchronous or asynchronous geo resiliency with Geo-Spread to meet their unique needs.
Western Digital also announced that they were integrating 14TB Ultrastar hard drives into their ActiveScale portfolio. ActiveScale appliances had previously been limited to 12TB drives, so this represents a 16 percent increase in storage density and improved cost/capacity.
Availability
Immediately
Amazon