Samsung and Western Digital Announce Partnership to Develop Storage Solutions

Western Digital and Samsung announced a partnership, to develop next-generation storage solutions. It will be the first time that both sign a collaboration.

Among the association’s initial focuses are cloud and enterprise applications, as well as standardization of technologies and software development for D2PF, such as the Zoned Store, a “storage class that enables devices and host to cooperate for more storage, higher performance, and lower latencies”. According to the announcement, the companies have already started working together on Zoned Store devices such as ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) SSDs and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) HDDs.

“Committed to enabling new architectures in data centers, they [Samsung y WD] founded the Zoned Storage TWG (Technical Work Group), which was approved by the Storage Networking Industry Association – SNIA – in December 2021,” the statement says.

The association is to improve storage in data centers

In addition to the initial collaboration on Zoned Store-based devices, Wester Digital and Samsung expect the partnership to expand to other emerging technologies as well, such as compute storage and storage fabrics, such as NVMe, for example. In the future, the idea is also to look at next-generation high-capacity storage devices.

“Our collaborative efforts will span hardware and software ecosystems to ensure that as many customers as possible can reap the benefits of this important technology,” said Jinman Han, corporate executive vice president, head of memory sales and marketing, Samsung Electronics.