The Association’s Goals are to Drive Market Education and Advocacy, Focusing on the Critical and Growing Role of Hard Disk Drives in Today’s Data Revolution

LONDON, August 14, 2013 – HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that it is a founding member of the Storage Products Association (SPA), with Seagate, Toshiba and WD. The SPA will serve as a new voice for the storage industry to help promote the important and growing role of hard disk drives (HDDs). The formation of the SPA to promote new innovations driven by hard disk drives – a sixty year old technology – points to the new and critical role HDDs play in enabling today’s and tomorrow’s data-intensive mobile and cloud world.

According to IDC, our digital universe will grow by a factor of 300 from 2005 to 2020, reaching 40 trillion gigabytes[1]. With this growth trajectory, the demand for high-capacity, high-performance and cost-effective storage will continue to soar, whether it’s for data stored locally, in the datacentre or in the cloud.  HGST believes one of the most pressing needs is to inform customers about how hard drive technology, solid state technology and variations of these technologies can be combined to efficiently scale to support the client market, and cloud and enterprise datacentre infrastructures to deliver value in terms of the best total cost of ownership (TCO).

Providing market education, the SPA’s mission is to help storage customers, partners and users understand, deploy and support current and future storage needs, including the key role of HDDs and solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs) in an effective storage mix for all consumer and business environments. The SPA will also participate in market research and events, as well as publish materials about end users’ storage needs and effective storage usage using a mix of technologies.

“We have seen the demand for storage products shift dramatically over the last ten years with the emergence of cloud computing, Internet search, social networks, big data and mobile computing,” said Mark Grace, senior vice president of marketing, HGST, and member of the SPA board of directors. “This period of remarkable change is driving the need for innovative and reliable high-performance and high-capacity storage with the best TCO, especially in the areas of hyperscale cloud datacentre infrastructures and cold storage environments. As storage companies, SPA members are at the forefront of this change, focused on evolving products to support changing market needs.”

More information about the SPA can be found at http://www.storage-products-association.org/.  You can also follow SPA on Twitter at www.twitter.com/storageproducts or @storageproducts.