Western Digital is undertaking a huge project – to own and integrate the entire stack from silicon, glass and sand to arrays and composable systems software.
Originally a disk drive manufacturer, the company has made at least 14 acquisitions in recent years. These include the purchase of HGST in 2012, which helped consolidate the hard drive industry and took WD in to archiving. In 2015 the company got into object storage by buying Amplidata and in 2016 it bought its way into NAND manufacture and SSDs with the SanDisk takeover. In 2017 WD entered the drive array market by buying Tegile.
In comparison to legacy disk drive competitor Seagate, WD’s business stretches further down the stack, into media and drive controller CPUs – RISC-V, and up the stack through drive arrays into system software.
To read more, please visit: https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/03/04/western-digital-full-storage-stack-goals/.