Western Digital expands Purple Pro product line for AI-enabled workloads

Western Digital Corp. today announced the expansion of the WD Purple family with the WD Purple Pro product line for a new generation of advanced AI-enabled recorders and back-end servers.

The worldwide video surveillance camera market is estimated to grow to $44 billion by 2025, up from $23.6 billion in 2019, according to IDC. Emerging smart video architectures that capture, store and analyze massive amounts of video data and perform heavy deep-learning video analytics, are putting an unprecedented level of stress on storage subsystems. The new WD Purple Pro line is designed to handle these workloads with optimized storage performance, capacity, workload capability and reliability for a myriad of devices, including AI-enabled network video recorders (NVRs), video analytics servers, storage arrays and storage/server solutions, including those that perform deep-learning analytics.

Jaganathan Chelliah, Director, Marketing, India, Western Digital, said, “With the addition of WD Purple Pro product line, our WD Purple portfolio of  smart video storage products are well positioned to harness the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. Unlike the traditional CCTV cameras, smart CCTV cameras today capture and transfers multiple video streams for AI based real time and batch analytics. Our WD Purple Pro HDDs with All frames AI tech has the capability to handle intense workload and enable users to derive deep insights.”

Khalid Wani, Director, Sales, India, Western Digital, said, “With the emerging AI workloads and video feeds with 4K resolution, there is a strong requirement for a smart video storage solution to address the high-capacity and reliability needs. Several large infrastructure projects are looking at AI based smart video solutions for use cases beyond safety. WD Purple Pro with up to 18TB capacity is the ideal solution to enable original equipment manufacturers and system integrators to solve this growing market requirement.”

WD Purple Pro hard drive benefits include:

• Enhanced AllFrame AI technology enabling video streams from up to 64 HD cameras to be recorded concurrently, while simultaneously handling up to an additional 32 AI streams for AI functions, whether cameras are directly connected to advanced recorders or to cloud-based servers.
• High performance and workload capability, supporting up to 550TB a year workload rating, provides for the additional demands of AI functionality, including pattern matching and object/event recognition, while writing a multitude of video streams.
• High reliability and capacity solutions help retain and feed thousands of hours of training video to enable effective deep-learning and AI algorithm development. Capacities range from 8TB to 18TB with a five-year limited warranty.
• Enterprise-class durability to work seamlessly in large-scale, high-density video analytics servers and cloud solutions. Offers ongoing HDD health monitoring in compatible systems with Western Digital Device Analytics support.

Western Digital’s full family of WD Purple solutions for smart video surveillance includes up to 1TB WD Purple microSD cards for cameras and edge devices to 1TB-8TB WD Purple HDDs for NVRs; and now, WD Purple Pro drives from 8TB to 18TB to support a range of systems for AI-heavy workloads, including back-end enterprise servers. WD Purple Pro solutions will be available this quarter from Western Digital resellers.

Availability and pricing

The WD Purple Pro HDD in 4TB is priced at INR 8999, 8TB at INR 25999, and is available in capacities up to 18TB. The current range of Western Digital Purple Pro HDDs are available at Isha Enterprise, Ace Metro, ADI and other leading IT partners across the country.