On a strong footing

Santosh Varghese, the Vice President of Toshiba Gulf FZE discusses how Toshiba with its strong portfolio of enterprise-grade hard drives that include next-generation technologies is geared to address the growing demand for data storage

Describe how Toshiba has enhanced its offering for the enterprise market with new launches. How do you see the demand growing in the enterprise segment?

Toshiba in July this year announced 30 TB hard Drives with two next-generation large-capacity magnetic recording technologies for HDD, HAMT: Heat  Assisted Magnetic Recording and MAMR: Magnetic Assisted Magnetic Recording.

166 ZB of data is expected to be produced by 2029 globally. All this data would need to be stored as businesses require this for decision making and end consumers would want to preserve their memories. So inevitably, demand for storage will increase year on year and capacities will get exponentially bigger.

Toshiba entered the HDD market in 1967 and has accumulated over 50 years of know-how in R&D. We are taking on the challenge of increasing and improving performance using cutting-edge technologies such as HAMR and MAMR, to address growing needs for high-performance and high-capacity enterprise drives.

How do you see the demand for hard drives in the enterprise environment? Is there a demand for hybrid storage solutions, including SSD and HDD combinations in enterprise environments?

As of 2021 approximately 63% of data storage worldwide is still done on HDD. By 2025  SSDs are expected to claim a 16% share of data storage with NAND making up 10%. Nonetheless, HDDs will continue to hold the majority share at 58%. By 20203 it’s projected that HDDs will still account for 48% of total storage while SSDs will grow to 29% and NAND will comprise 12%.

How do your drives support cloud storage environments and the growing demand for AI workloads? 

Toshiba Enterprise drives are meant for Datacenter and Enterprise Cloud Storage. High-capacity Enterprise HDDs provide data centers and servers with high-quality low-power solutions. Social infrastructure must operate consistently and reliably 24/7/365. the importance of this technology increases year by year. Toshiba HDD is a crucial device that forms the foundation of a data society and contributes to the advancement of digitalization. Toshiba focuses on three fields that transform industry and society and these are

• Internal Solutions for data centers and servers used for cloud services
• Internal Solutions for dedicated equipment used for data storage such as Surveillance and NAS(Network Attached Storage )
• Personal Storage solutions for backing up ever growing Data

Discuss the focus on data security in your solutions from an enterprise point of view?

Data Security is a critical part of the entire IT infrastructure. It is a no-compromise requirement as data is the new currency.  Our enterprise drives provide reliable, Enterprise-grade storage designed for 24/7 high-duty-cycle workloads. They protect against data loss in the event of unexpected power loss and help maintain optimum data reliability for high-duty cycle Mission-critical environments.

Discuss the focus on energy efficiency in your drives for large-scale enterprise deployments.

We contribute to achieving the SDGs by reducing environmental impacts throughout the product lifecycle including design, procurement, manufacture, distribution, and use. At our mass production site, we use electricity derived from 100% renewable energy; by lowering power consumption our products help to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In our Enterprise MG series Drives, Toshiba utilizes Precision laser welding technology to seal helium inside the 9 disk mechanics for the drive. The Helium Sealed design reduces aerodynamic drag to deliver a lower operational power profile helping to achieve TCO Objectives for cloud scale and software-defined Data centre infrastructure

Discuss how the Build Your Own datacentre initiative has been received over the past 2 years. Do you intend to continue the same or are there any new initiatives?

BYODC initiative is an innovative initiative by Toshiba Gulf to build a data center rather than installing a ready-made solution, thereby saving up to 30% on costs. It is an ecosystem of vendors(Servers /JBOD/ Software/ HDD )  System integrators and end customers. End customers can select the best-of-the-breed components to build a Data centre solution that is highly reliable and scalable. We have seen a significant interest in this initiative across the region and hope to consolidate our position with the BYODC initiative. We have now set up a demo center where end customers and end users can get hands on expertise in BYODC

Since the BYODC launch in early 2023, we have Toshiba’s share in enterprise storage reached more than 15% from just 2% a year earlier in the MEA region.

Discuss the focus on surveillance solutions.

Toshiba last month announced its next-generation S300 Pro Surveillance Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) targeting the latest requirements in the surveillance storage market. With capacities up to10TB and double the buffer size, the upgraded HDDs with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology enable surveillance system integrators, system installation providers, and end users to record, store and analyze their video streams from up to 64 high-definition (HD) cameras. The high scalable, 3.5-inch[4] S300 Pro Surveillance HDDs, with capacity options of 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, and 10TB, now support up to 24 bays, making them an excellent fit for large-scale video recording systems, delivering reliable operation even in the most demanding environments. Additionally, compared to the previous generation, the new S300 Pro provides a higher maximum sustained transfer speed of 268MiB/s[ and doubles the cache buffer size to 512MiB. The S300 Pro HDDs also reduce power consumption, delivering improved total cost of ownership (TCO). With 24/7 operation, an enhanced annual workload of 300TB[7] and a mean time to failure (MTTF) of up to 1.2 million hours, the S300 Pro can handle the increasing video analysis demands of mission-critical surveillance footage. The next-generation S300 Pro’s extended warranty period, from 3 to 5 years, demonstrates Toshiba’s high durability and engineering quality of its HDDs