1. What will Western Digital be showcasing at this year’s INTERSEC 2022?
At Intersec, Western Digital will highlight the importance of security and smart video needs with flexible infrastructure and data solutions to address applications from in-camera recording to multi-stream AI and offer more choice. In addition, Western Digital will exhibit its WD Purple® product range, which is engineered specifically for smart video and surveillance and includes three product solutions – WD Purple Pro HDD, WD Purple HDD and WD Purple microSD card. Offering improved efficiency for overall video playback, these devices bring reliable, surveillance-class storage that has been tested for compatibility in a wide range of smart video.
Moreover, the company will be showcasing its Ultrastar® series of high capacity hard drives to support cloud service providers, telcos and system integrators. The Ultrastar DC HC560, with the first implementation of OptiNAND™ technology’s capacity-enabling features, delivers an unbeaten 20TB capacity in a nine-disk platform (2.2TB/platter) with CMR recording format.
2. What is your outlook on the security and surveillance market in the UAE?
The market needs to be flexible and open when it comes to security and surveillance solutions. To call one solution safer than the other is entirely subjective to the environmental needs of each business entity. What works for one infrastructure may be entirely different for another. What we need these businesses to understand is that, by weaving concepts together, a next-generation architecture can be created to help provide security over many technology layers.
The good news is that businesses have a broader choice than ever to construct varying performance and capacity capabilities to meet exact security needs and ensure flexibility as infrastructure evolves to address risk. No matter the technology, data security should, first and foremost, support the business strategy and tactical needs of the organization.
3. In Western Digital’s opinion, what technologies should hybrid businesses focus on to remain competitive in the market?
Modern data protection is indeed changing, and enterprises are faced with a number of options that can help to meet data availability requirements. Data needs to be on the right storage tier at the right time, to meet access requests without breaking the bank.
As our world becomes more data-centric, the landscape of data protection is changing rapidly. Data can’t be held back at any tier or for any workload, and recovery times are becoming shorter and critical.
Now is the time to get rid of those antiquated notions that using flash and cloud for data protection is crazy. Flash and cloud are playing a transformative role in shaping data infrastructure and architecture. The time is right to leverage both the power of flash and cloud to modernize your data protection environment.
There are clear advantages to using flash for data security over solely relying on secure networks. Enterprise flash devices have been engineered with unprecedented reliability, end to end protection, temperature throttling technology, and groundbreaking Quality of Service (QoS). In fact, they are far more reliable and offers greater performance than the HDDs our industry has relied on for years.
But for organizations dealing with terabytes and petabytes of data, most advanced IT organizations in the world are turning to cloud storage. Cloud storage is a relatively cost-effective archive solution that leverages extreme high capacity HDDs and erasure coding techniques for data reliability. It’s what powers at-scale cloud providers and many customers are leveraging these efficiencies by adopting object-based storage in their on-premises data center. Cloud object storage provides rapid restores of data from high speed disk, very efficient and cost-effective storage for long-term retention.