By MICHAEL CIRCLE
The Data Group News Service
Western Digital Corp. unveiled a new storage framework Wednesday aimed at helping customers manage the massive data demands of artificial intelligence workloads.
The company's AI Data Cycle concept outlines the different storage needs for the six stages involved in training, deploying and running AI models. It allows customers to optimize their infrastructure by matching Western Digital's solid-state drives and hard disk drives to each stage's performance and capacity requirements.
"Data is the fuel of AI. As AI technologies become embedded across virtually every industry sector, storage has become an increasingly important and dynamic component of the AI technology stack," said Rob Soderbery, an executive vice president at Western Digital.
To address the intense computational needs of large language models and other AI applications, Western Digital introduced its first PCIe Gen5 solid-state drive, the Ultrastar DC SN861. With industry-leading random read performance of up to 16 terabytes capacity, it delivers ultra-low latency for AI training, inferencing and deployment.
The company also expanded its Ultrastar DC SN655 solid-state drive line with new 64-terabyte models for rapidly building out high-performance data lakes to feed AI systems.
On the hard disk side, Western Digital started sampling a new 32-terabyte Ultrastar DC HC690 drive, which uses energy-assisted PMR technology. The high-capacity drive provides cost-effective storage at scale for the huge datasets required by AI workflows.
The product launches show Western Digital positioning itself as a key supplier of purpose-built storage solutions as generative AI goes mainstream across industries like tech, finance, health care and manufacturing.
For more information on Western Digital Corp., please visit Press Releases | Western Digital.
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