Earlier this week, WD invited media and sales partners to a briefing to highlight a few aspects of their roadmap and products to tackle the ever increasing demands for more storage. The showcase emphasized a number of their already existing portfolio, which includes storage mediums for specific needs, from gaming, to servers, to surveillance. Each of the categories are split into recognisable colours, Red for NAS, Blue for Home, Black for Gaming, Purple for Surveillance, and Gold for Datacentres.
In addition to the already available product lines, WD also discussed their recent acquisition of SanDisk, which opens up a whole new market for the company, bringing in an established SSD player, almost doubling their revenue going forward for the company. With the recent exponential growth of SSDs thanks to mobile and gaming markets, it was a necessary strategy to extend their reach in this segment. There were no immediate discussions on how the company will incorporate or brand SanDisk into WD, or how new SSD releases under the WD umbrella will be sold.
Although SSD is an important stream in the storage industry, capacity still remains the number one factor in the market, even more so with the inclusion of security and surveillance, mobile and cloud facilities. Given the astronomical figures for storage consumption, Facebook with 350 million photos uploaded daily, 144,000 hours of video on YouTube, the demands are only increasing. At a personal level, the average household uses 3.3TB of storage in 2016, which is expected to increase in the coming years.
Gareth Pon, South Africa’s top Instagrammer, also shared his views on the growing need to provide better storage solutions, not just from a point of backing up and more capacity, but also the ease of doing so on the fly. Filming and photography, his two main focus areas, require large amounts of files and data to be saved and transferred on a daily basis, without ever wanting to get rid of any raw footage, means that using the latest WD technology and software is critical to the creation process, without which would dramatically increase copying and backup times.
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