ITechnology Interview with Scott Hamilton, Senior Director, Product Management & Marketing at Western Digital

“Our Latest Announcement Is a New Addition to Ultrastar Edge Server Family, Which Is Designed to Fuel Faster Decisions at the Edge of Computing and in Harsh Remote Environments.”

Please tell us about your role and the team / technology you handle at Western Digital. How did you arrive at Western Digital? 

I’m the leader of product management and marketing for the Platforms Business Unit here at Western Digital. We offer a diverse product portfolio spanning external storage, specialized storage servers, and composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). Throughout my career I have focused on platforms, systems and solutions leveraging innovative storage, IT and communications technologies. I joined Western Digital because of the breadth and depth of their portfolio and the opportunity to be an integral part of next-generation infrastructures like CDI.

What is the most contemporary definition of a High Performance Computing (HPC) What kind of influence does HPC have on the overall IT business?

HPC takes traditional computing to a completely different level delivering the parallel processing power of tens of thousands of PCs clustered together to accelerate complex calculations to advance research in various industries and disciplines including space, weather, medicine, manufacturing, energy and defense. While the HPC market is a smaller subset of the overall IT market, it is a catalyst for and early adopter of leading-edge technologies and infrastructure.

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Tell us more about your latest announcement and how it would benefit your customers?

Our latest announcement is a new addition to our Ultrastar Edge server family, which is designed to fuel faster decisions at the edge of computing and in harsh remote environments. It not only benefits our day to day customers, but also benefits military and specialized field teams as well. The new high-performance Ultrastar Edge server brings compute closer to where data is generated for faster processing, lower latency, and real-time decision making, even when disconnected. It’s designed for cloud service providers, telcos, and system integrators and is easy to transport, deploy and scale in the field, at co-location (colo) facilities, in a factory, or in remote data centers.

How do you help customers make a better decision with their enterprise data management frameworks?

Because we are a hardware provider to cloud service providers, OEMs and systems integrators, our goal is to work closely with our customers to provide storage platforms that best suit the needs of their end customers. For example our innovations in disk enclosures, ArcticFlow and IsoVibe, enable better cooling, lower fan speeds, reduced vibration, lower power consumption, quieter operation and ultimately higher reliability, While our OpenFlex product lines allow storage to be disaggregated from compute, enabling applications to share a common pool of storage capacity. This advanced approach means we can enable our customers to deliver data management innovation to their customers.

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5G, IOT and Cloud are seen as the most promising emerging technologies? How do you work with these technologies at Western Digital?

With the growing adoption of 5G, IoT and the cloud, businesses and consumers have come to expect super-fast performance with their applications. This is creating demand for new, distributed intelligent architectures outside of core data centers to help ingest, analyze and transform data at the edge. At Western Digital, we’re taking into account the impact these emerging technologies have on our customers, and designing storage solutions that address their specific needs. Vast amounts of data are created, especially by IoT and IIoT sensors which are not stored today. In 2021, we will see a new generation of storage device based on host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDD technology emerge, giving way to platforms specifically designed for colder storage tiers making long-term data storage more economical and accessible for data at scale either on premises or in the cloud for decades to come.

Tell us more about your product roadmap for Edge Computing at Western Digital? How is 5G networking influencing the various Edge infrastructures? 

Edge computing is entering mainstream adoption. Organizations are extending and expanding the possibilities of the cloud to remote locations and are taking advantage of IoT and 5G to deliver transformational services and applications. The growing adoption of 5G, IoT and the cloud is driving the need for ruggedized compute and storage at the edge where networks can be expensive, intermittent or nonexistent. As we work closely with our customers on defining new product opportunities, we see a closer relationship between storage and compute. This is primarily to reduce latency and network traffic, but new applications will be enabled. Just think back to the introduction of ridesharing, which would be unthinkable in its current form without 4G. Having compute next to the data collection point is likely to have similar impact.

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What is your prediction on the future of CIOs role in the post-COVID world?

The past year or so has been a huge, forced experiment for IT organizations: many were already planning for greater remote working; many were already considering an expansion of cloud-first deployments. The experience of the past 15 months or so will greatly influence CIOs for years to come. Some will have found new tools and organizational approaches that work for them, others will have confirmed their preference for what they were doing before. Either way, the experience will generally have left them with much more clarity on the best way to drive their business. 

Thank you, Scott! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.