Helping the world harness the power of data, Western Digital has become an active contributor to iRODS, a membership-based consortium that develops and supports the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), an open source software platform for storing, searching, and sharing large files and datasets. Thousands of organizations around the world use iRODS for flexible, policy-based management of files and metadata that span across diverse storage devices and locations. Western Digital Corporation will initially contribute HGST S3 connector technology to the iRODS architecture to enhance cloud connectivity.

Last April, WD released the HGST Active Archive System, a fully integrated, Amazon S3TM-compliant, scale-out object storage solution delivering 4.7 petabytes (PB) of raw data storage in a single rack. Leveraging HelioSeal helium-filled disk drive technology and end-to-end optimization of system software and hardware, the system provides great capacity, density and TCO with support for geo-dispersed replication, data-at-rest encryption (DARE), as well as distributed erasure coding for cloud-scale data durability and reliability.