Vishal Jose Mannanal | Storage Technologist
Dropbox

Vishal Jose Mannanal is a Storage Technologist at Dropbox, where he works on large scale HDD fleet engineering, qualification and reliability for exabyte scale storage infrastructure. His work focuses on high density magnetic recording technologies including SMR and HAMR, fleet level telemetry analysis and hardware aware system design to ensure durable and cost efficient capacity growth. Previously, Vishal held senior engineering roles at Microsoft and Microsemi, working on storage systems, firmware and distributed infrastructure. He has over two decades of experience in storage technologies spanning device firmware, system architecture and hyperscale operations. He holds a Masters in Computer Applications.

Appearances:

Future of Memory and Storage - Day 2 @ 16:05

Operating HAMR at Scale: Qualification, Reliability and Fleet Readiness

Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) marks the next step in magnetic recording as capacities move beyond 30TB and continue to grow. While density gains are well understood, operating HAMR drives in production introduces new qualification, reliability and fleet management considerations. Localized heating affects media behavior, write stability and failure patterns, requiring adjustments in characterization, burn in strategy, stress validation and telemetry thresholds.

This session shares practical lessons from qualifying and deploying HAMR drives in production environments and the framework used to prepare additional vendors for fleet introduction. We will discuss how reliability modeling, rebuild dynamics and telemetry interpretation evolved and how drive level signals such as FARM/FACT telemetry logs and other vendor diagnostic logs are used to identify emerging failure patterns. The focus is on operational reality and ensuring that higher capacity translates into sustainable fleet scale deployment.

Vishal Jose Mannanal, Storage Technologist, Dropbox

Eric Shobe, Senior Manager, Dropbox