HGST has announced that it has joined the Open Compute Project, an initiative launched by Facebook in 2011, to increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impacts of data centers.

With the explosion of data resulting from mobile devices, Internet services, social media and business applications, corporate, cloud, and big data customers are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and their bottomline. The Open Compute Project applies open-source software principles to the hardware industry to drive the development of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. HGST will contribute its expertise toward defining storage solutions that deliver the performance and density required while achieving low total cost of ownership (TCO) reflected in metrics such as cost-per-terabyte, watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight and TB-per-square foot.*

"Demand for storage is booming as IT managers strive to handle the avalanche of new data being generated by cloud data centers, Big Data analytics, social networking, HD video and millions of mobile devices," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST. "As a strategic drive supplier and consultant to Facebook and in collaboration with the Open Compute Project, we're defining best practices in the storage industry to afford end-users with greater capital savings, operational efficiencies, and energy conservation in the data center."

The fourth Open Compute Summit is being held January 16-17, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center – 5001 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, Calif. As a Summit sponsor, HGST will be showcasing its Ultrastar™ 4TB enterprise-class HDD, the world's first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive, which provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. The 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 family raises the bar with a five-year limited warranty and a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF. As a leader in enterprise-class SAS SSDs, HGST will also be showcasing its Ultrastar enterprise-class SSDs that meet the performance, capacity, endurance, and reliability demands of today's Tier 0, mission-critical data center applications.

*One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.