At Supercomputing 2025 (SC25) in St. Louis, Western Digital (Nasdaq: WDC) is highlighting next-generation storage platforms designed to accelerate AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. The company’s showcase emphasizes capacity, performance, and flexibility, aiming to break the bottlenecks that often slow model training, large-scale simulations, and research data processing.
“Our platforms serve as a force multiplier,” said Kurt Chan, VP and GM of Western Digital Platforms Business. “From SMR democratization to our expanded OCCL ecosystem, we’re architecting the foundation for tomorrow’s most ambitious computational workloads.”
Powering AI Breakthroughs
Western Digital is demonstrating how its storage infrastructure integrates with AI software providers like PEAK:AIO, using NVMe-oF™ architectures to decouple storage and compute. The result: faster GPU utilization, reduced time-to-insight, and scalable AI model development across research, enterprise, and HPC environments.
Democratizing SMR HDD Technology
Western Digital is expanding UltraSMR HDD technology beyond hyperscale environments. Its Ultrastar® Data60 and Data102 JBODs, featuring 32TB UltraSMR drives, deliver up to 3.26 petabytes in a single enclosure. Partners like Leil Storage and Swiss Vault have optimized software to leverage SMR’s sequential write advantages while managing operational requirements, enabling mid-market enterprises, universities, and research labs to conduct exabyte-scale data analysis sustainably.
This approach reduces power consumption per terabyte while significantly increasing storage density, making it feasible for more organizations to handle large-scale AI and HPC workloads without hyperscaler budgets.
Expanded Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL)
The OCCL ecosystem now includes ASUS, Leil Storage, Open-E, Solidigm, and Swiss Vault, in addition to existing participants like DapuStor, Phison, and Sandisk. The lab provides pre-validated, interoperable solutions, reducing integration risk and eliminating vendor lock-in. Customers can now scale storage and compute independently, optimizing for performance, cost, and supply chain resilience.
Why It Matters
For AI researchers and HPC teams, storage bottlenecks often constrain performance, limit scalability, and increase costs. Western Digital’s solutions—spanning SMR-enabled JBODs, OpenFlex® Data24 disaggregated storage, and RapidFlex™ NVMe-oF controllers—aim to unlock high-capacity, high-performance storage for organizations of all sizes, from startups to large research institutions.
Power Tomorrow’s Intelligence — Build It with TechEdgeAI
