Optimising TCO for data-intensive technologies and applications
The pace of digital transformation and artificial intelligence has triggered an unprecedented surge in data generation. In response, data storage has become a vital cornerstone of modern infrastructure - essential to keeping up with this rapid evolution.
Organisations of all sizes are feeling the pressure, but the impact is especially profound on hyperscale enterprises, including the world's largest search, social media, entertainment, and eCommerce platforms. For these businesses, scaling storage infrastructure efficiently, cost-effectively, and sustainably is key to long-term success.
In Australia, hyperscalers and colocation providers are accelerating large-scale investments driven by growing AI and cloud demand to establish high performance and high-capacity computing infrastructure. The Australian data centre market was valued at US$6.81 billion in 2024, and is projected to reach US$8.58 billion by 2030 - reinforcing the country's potential for growth.
With growing volumes of data, use cases and applications in the cloud and on-premises, data centre managers are also constantly under pressure to provide unwavering reliability and Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance at the lowest possible cost. Lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) influences almost every decision they make. And achieving the lowest possible TCO is money saved, which drives revenue and fuels additional services.
HDD innovations redefine cost efficiency
TCO is complex; it is strategic, and it is long-term. Reducing TCO also involves numerous factors. The cost of a drive or the price per terabyte (TB) is important, but this is just one of several considerations that go into a compound equation that can help lower TCO. Other factors can include the amount of floor space, the cost of power and cooling, and maintenance and repairs, just to name a few.
The pressure to cut TCO is influencing data centres to increasingly rely on storage solutions that offer high-capacity, low power, performance and proven reliability in a cost-effective design. In fact, HDD innovation continues to be the backbone for data-heavy technologies and applications to thrive.
Today, most of the world's stored data resides on HDDs and there is simply no substitute that can deliver the same TCO value at scale for data centres - not flash, not tape. For data centre architects, moving to the highest capacity HDDs quickly means scaling efficiently without increasing the physical footprint while reducing watts/TB, power and cooling costs.
HDDs today are designed to hold more data within the same 3.5-inch footprint, scaling for exponential growth while reducing TCO. Innovations like helium-sealed drives, OptiNAND technology, UltraSMR, and energy-assisted technologies have enhanced capacity, performance, reliability, and power efficiency of today's massive-capacity HDDs.
For example, replacing 24TB HDDs with 32TB HDDs to deploy 2PB of storage can reduce server count by 25%, cut energy consumption per terabyte by 20%, and lower infrastructure and maintenance costs. These gains reduce physical space requirements and operational expenses while maintaining storage performance, helping businesses optimise their storage density and costs.
Innovation push
More data equals more value especially for AI, and businesses would store more data if they could do so in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Moving to the highest capacity HDDs can help.
High-capacity HDDs will continue to play a key role in all of this and are the most economical media to store massive amounts of data online and at scale. The benefits translate into overall data centre power and cooling savings, which can play an important role in helping data centres operate greener.
