Storage technologies before & after pandemic – Interview with WD’s Saifuddin Khwaja

Today’s world revolves around data, yet many people don’t know how to use and manage the ream of data that is created every day. We asked Saifuddin Khwaja, Senior Sales Director at Western Digital, a few questions for our special feature on ‘storage & servers.’ The director of WD spoke on the challenges that CTOs and CIOs face, the adoption of storage technologies before and after the pandemic, WD’s innovative solutions, and the Middle Eastern storage industry. The responses we got are listed below.

TECHx: What are the primary challenges that CTOs and CIOs face nowadays in terms of data management?

Saifuddin: As businesses create and generate a growing amount of data, we need to both capture this data and retain it for insights, but also transform it just as quickly as we create it. To manage this mountain of data, and its many different forms and turn it from input to asset you need a plan.

Business leaders need to look at the bigger picture of data as an enterprise asset because when a company’s data strategy is aligned with their business strategy, better business decisions can happen. The challenge is aligning both strategies, which can require heavy lifting, but if you put the work in, organizations will start to see the business benefits.

Data infrastructure is critical in our digital world as data must be stored and analyzed quickly, efficiently, and securely. Thus, data architectures need to go beyond simple data capture and storage to data transformation and creating business value, in a ‘value creation approach.

Many businesses, however, still use general-purpose architecture to manage their IoT data. This architecture does not fully meet the varying needs of IoT applications and workloads for consumers and enterprises.

For example, whilst search and rescue drones prioritize endurance and resilience, storage solutions in digital healthcare applications must focus on offering long-term retention and security for critical health records. 

Therefore, businesses must be a move from general-purpose storage, to purpose-built data storage and different solutions for different needs.

TECHx: What’s the difference between enterprises adopting storage technologies before and after the pandemic?

Saifuddin: Whilst the digital environment has been constantly changing in the Middle East over the last few years, the pandemic ushered in, by necessity, a degree of digital transformation that is unprecedented for the region in both its scale and scope. The rapid acceleration of digital across both private and public sectors alike forced the rollout of digital systems and placed connected technology and data storage at the forefront of adoption.

TECHx: Tell us about some of your new storage solutions that are assisting businesses and people in keeping their data safe. What makes your products stand out to customers?

Saifuddin: Robust storage solutions are needed for the rising needs of businesses and consumers. Western Digital offers a portfolio of products, covering a range of market segments, created to enable customers to derive valuable insights and intelligence from data.

For business, products like our UltraStar product range offer higher capacity hard drives to help lower CapEx by reducing supporting hardware and system-level costs when compared to lower capacity drives. An enterprise-grade drive designed for cloud service providers, telcos, and system integrators; the Ultrastar Edge servers are easy to transport, deploy and scale in the field, at co-location (colo) facilities, in a factory, or in remote data centers. A durable, high-speed server that supports up to 40 cores with two 2nd Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, an NVIDIA® Tesla® T4 GPU, and eight Ultrastar NVMe™ SSDs providing up to 61TB of storage. This unique combination delivers blazing speeds and capacity for real-time analytics, AI, deep learning, ML training and inference, and video transcoding at the edge.

Or choose to add the power of NVMe™ to your enterprise to improve system responsiveness and boost productivity while lowering your overall TCO. Work with confidence knowing you have power loss protection and the ability to stop anyone from accessing sensitive data by eliminating it with fast and effective secure erase technology. Available in a range of capacities to meet your business’s specific needs, WD Gold™ NVMe SSDs can work alone or perfectly complement your WD Gold HDDs and other HDDs to handle tough workloads with the endurance you can trust.

For consumers, they can trust our varied storage solutions. Whether for desktop, PC, mobile, or tablet we have a range of products available to suit the data needs of consumers. The My Passport drive is the trusted, portable storage solution that pairs with WD Backup™ software and password protection to keep digital life contents safe. With up to 5 TB of capacity and a new, stylish design that fits in the palm of your hand, there’s space to store, organize, and share your photos, videos, music, and documents. We also offer a range of Mobile Storage Solutions that cater to consumers on the go. Offering up to 256 GB, the iXpand Go helps users free up valuable space on mobile and tablet devices. Using the high-speed USB 3.0 connector, users can quickly transfer files from their iXpand Go to their computer and not having to email photos between devices. In addition, with the Ultra Dual Drive Go USB Type-C, users can easily move files between USB Type-C smartphones, tablets and Macs, and USB Type-A computers. Both these devices are built with portability in mind, users can carry them around in their laptop or personal bags, and they can take even more photos and access them across all devices.

TECHx: What is the storage market like in the Middle East? What data storage developments might we expect to see in the next years?

Saifuddin: The next few years should be an exciting time for smart technology providers in the Middle East. The market is growing, and consumers are excited for what’s coming next, but a lack of knowledge around smart technology infrastructure threatens this progress and the gains that will go with it.

As various technologies continue to evolve so will the data storage needs and how to get the best value from it.  Specialized storage is therefore necessary to create optimum value from IoT data, which must be considered when building out the wider data infrastructure.

The implementation of the right storage infrastructure and technology and subsequent education on them will help consumers to feel that their information is more secure and remove doubt around these technologies.