At Western Digital's Innovation Day 2026 event, the company announced a new intelligent storage platform layer with open APIs that is designed to help customers operating 200+ PB fleets to both manage those devices and seamlessly add new ones.
The software layer is set to launch in 2027 and is intended to simplify integration of different classes of storage devices (including UltraSMR hard drives by non-hyperscalers), reduce qualification risk, and accelerate deployment of new devices. As an added bonus (to WD, at least), that platform layer will lock in customers with its hardware.
Now that solid-state drives command the lion’s share of client storage devices, data center-grade storage represents the majority of Western Digital’s business and the company has to adjust its offerings accordingly. While large hyperscalers develop their own hardware stacks, smaller players lack appropriate resources, making it increasingly hard for them to manage their expanding fleets of storage servers.
As a consequence, while these cloud and enterprise organizations increasingly operate storage pools totaling hundreds of petabytes, they still rely on manual integration, long qualification cycles, and fragmented storage tiers. To help its partners, Western Digital's new intelligent storage platform software abstracts complexity of large-scale storage environments and exposes them as programmable infrastructure. The goal is not to replace existing architectures, but to overlay them with automation and management capabilities that simplifies integration and accelerates time-to-production.
This new platform is designed to support the entire Western Digital portfolio, including SSDs, high-performance/high-capacity ePMR and HAMR-based HDDs, and ultra-high capacity SMR and UltraSMR hard drives. Using a common software framework will make it easier for cloud and enterprise customers to adopt new technologies that were otherwise hard or risky for them to use, including the latest and upcoming HDD platforms.
For obvious reasons, such a software layer locks customers with Western Digital and makes it far less appealing for them to adopt drives from rivals Seagate or Toshiba.
"WD's Innovation Day revealed a company that has genuinely transformed its strategy around customer infrastructure needs," said Ed Burns, HDD Research Director at IDC. "The market validation is already evident – customers are deploying these solutions because WD is solving what matters most for AI infrastructure: reliable capacity at scale, performance that meets demanding workloads, and economics that enable profitability. This customer-centric approach, combined with operational discipline positions WD well in the market going forward."
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