In an exclusive interview with Mr. Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group and Country Manager for India & SAARC at Seagate Technology, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor of Digital Terminal, delves into the tech giant's product strategy for the festive season, industry trends, and ambitious growth plans. Bhatia discusses Seagate's cutting-edge advancements, particularly the revolutionary Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, and sheds light on the challenges and solutions surrounding the ever-expanding landscape of data storage. Read Below the excerpts:
Rajeev: What are the new products Seagate is launching in this OND quarter?
Sameer: As advanced technologies such as generative AI reshape India's landscape, businesses face unprecedented data challenges in an increasingly distributed IT ecosystem. What we are focused on right now is driving the revolution in hard drives’ areal density advancements. We aim to help enterprises be more efficient with their data centres and realise a reduction in TCO. Seagate began shipments of 30+ terabyte hard drives based on our heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology earlier this year, and we plan to do so in volume early next year. We have also announced this quarter our Exos X24, the highest capacity, 24TB enterprise hard drives, as we continue to answer demand for mass data storage.
Rajeev: What are the current industry trends in storage solutions?
Sameer: In last few years, there has been tremendous shift in the way we adopt storage solutions. Below are the few trends in the industry currently.
Data growth is outstripping storage capacity.
There is an insatiable demand for storage, which is only ever increasing with the rise of generative AI applications. The speed at which data is growing—per IDC, 291ZB of data is expected to be generated in 2027—requires a solution. Hard drive production must increase exponentially when the need arises, for cloud data storage and AI to be able to grow with the demand.
Cost and physical data center space are the obstacles to addressing the data growth.
There is a need for mass data storage deployment at scale and hard drives technology remain the storage technology best suited. Increasing areal density, the crux of hard drive technology, addresses this challenge. Areal density allows higher density for hard drives to store more in a rack in a data centre, defined the hard drive capacity per disk. HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) enables the untapped solution – areal density innovation – to expand capacity without the need for more data centre space, optimizing the total cost of ownership (TCO) especially when running infrastructure at scale.
Data centers are overdue for a hard drive refresh
In reality, many data centers need to refresh their lower-capacity storage. The lower capacity drives that populate many data centers (4TB, 8TB, and 16TB per drive) need to be updated as they age. Updating from the conventional 16TB drives to the first-generation HAMR-enabled 3TB-per-disk, 10-platter drives enable close to 2:1 power and space savings. This means not having to build extra data centers. Companies will be able to support data storage better thanks to this, and they will also be able to invest the money left over in supporting the GPUs and CPUs that are so critical for today’s growing AI workload.
Rajeev: What is the technology or innovation to look forward to this quarter?
Sameer: That will be HAMR. It underscores breakthroughs in areal density for hard drives, propelling storage capacities to new heights. HAMR will be redefining the storage landscape in following ways.
· Higher storage capacities per disk: Areal density is the amount of data that can be stored on a given unit of storage media, a defining value of hard drive capacity. A denser hard drive allows for more storage inside the same slot or data centre, setting a higher threshold for data capacity. This enables I leaders to increase data volume stored and managed more efficiently with less physical space.
· Cost-Efficiency: Through higher areal density within the drive, data centres can achieve greater TCO efficiency, reducing storage-related costs. This efficiency is realized through reduced component count, such as fewer heads, within these denser drives. There are many factors that feed into TCO of data centres, but all other variables being equal (setting all other factors aside), the TCO savings should be approximately proportional to the device capacity increase, so about 25% for the above drive comparison. For future generations of HAMR-enabled drives, these savings ramp up.
· Sustainability: Enhanced areal density means fewer materials are used for the same storage capacity. This leads to efficient resource utilisation, decreased drive count, and overall improved data management processes, especially in hyperscale environment. This is why areal density matters as companies consider environmental impacts: areal density enables companies to reduce the carbon footprint through power and space savings, championing a sustainable datasphere.
Rajeev: How is Seagate planning to engage with its customer base during the festive season, and are there any special promotions or events planned?
Sameer: This festive season, we doubled down on our consumer-centric approach by running special offers ranging from 30% off, up to 70% discount on a variety of product categories. This includes HDDs like Seagate Ultra Touch; SSDs such as FireCuda 530 and FireCuda 530 Heatsink; plus, special edition FireCuda external hard drives like Shuri, Okoye, Han Solo and Game Drive Xbox - Halo Infinite.
