Hybrid Disk/Flash Storage Isn’t New, But It Is Getting Better
Five years ago, Western Digital, known for its hard disk drive (HDD) storage technologies, doled out $19 billion in cash and stock for SanDisk and its solid state drive (SDD) product portfolio, giving it deep expertise in the non-volatile flash memory space at a time when enterprises were looking for expanded storage options in the wake of the rise of the cloud and the edge.
At the time the deal was announced in 2015 — the acquisition closed a year later — then-CEO of Western Digital Steve Milligan boasted that the “combined company will be ideally positioned to capture the growth opportunities created by the rapidly evolving storage industry.” The company also noted that with SanDisk in the fold, the combination of the two will enable Western Digital to “vertically integrate into NAND, securing long-term access to solid state technology at lower cost.”
The deal gave Western Digital a much broader portfolio of technologies and expanded reach beyond HDDs. Earlier this month, the company announced that in the most recent quarter, revenue jumped 15 percent year-over-year, to $4.9 billion. In its Data Center Devices and Solutions business unit, Western Digital reached a record shipment of more than 104 exabytes in capacity enterprise hard drives, with almost half of those shipments centered on the company’s 18-terabyte hard drive. Demand for enterprise SSDs also grew, with the company seeing growing interest in a broad range of companies as well as cloud providers.
