Western Digital creates a splash at Flash Summit

Western Digital has introduced new innovations and a leadership initiative to drive greater support and adoption of open, composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). In addition to its OpenFlex NVMe-oF storage platform, architecture and open API, Western Digital is driving broader industry support with the launch of the industry’s first Open Composable Compliance Lab, a multi-vendor ecosystem of compute, storage and networking to help test and validate end-to-end interoperability among solutions, ensuring enterprise customers have a choice when designing next-generation, disaggregated IT infrastructure. 

 

OpenFlex F3100, the Fastest NVMe-oF Open Composable Storage Platform

As a key NVMe-oF foundational building block of CDI, Western Digital’s OpenFlex platform provides the storage tools and resources for organizations taking a truly disaggregated approach to their software-defined storage (SDS) infrastructure. By disaggregating compute, storage and network into virtual resource pools, IT managers can easily provision those resources on the fly, enabling better asset utilization and simplified operations. For example, when compared to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the OpenFlex platform can eliminate underutilized resources and reduce TCO by up to 40 percent¹.

 

Western Digital’s OpenFlex family includes: 

 

• OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric Device: A shared storage device providing up to 2.1 million IOPS, 11.7 GBps throughput, and latencies less than 48 microseconds in a single NVMe-oF device. Each fabric device is available in capacities of up to 61TB, delivering extreme performance over two 50 gigabit Ethernet ports.

• OpenFlex E3000 Series Fabric Enclosure: A 3U enclosure that houses up to 10 hot-swappable F3100 fabric devices. The combination of the OpenFlex E3000 fabric enclosure with up to 10 OpenFlex F3100 fabric devices leads the industry in performance density for open composable platforms projecting up to 7.2M IOPS per rack unit (RU) and 39 GBps/RU with a raw capacity density of 205 TB/RU.
• OpenFlex Open Composability API:  A RESTful API that builds upon industry standards such as the DMTF Common Information Model, JSON, and HTTP as well as best practices from other industry-captive management protocols. It provides a framework to help orchestrate fabric-attached devices, including compute, flash, disk, network, accelerators and disaggregated memory into composed systems.

“As a leading brain and spine research institute, our goal is to help prevent, cure, repair and relieve nervous system diseases and injuries, globally. With that, we are constantly adopting the latest generation of IT infrastructure and technologies to help us keep pace with the demands of medical science research and discovery – all driven by data,” said Caroline Vidal, CTO and Ludovic Prévost, IT architect at ICM. “Brought to us by our partner 2CRSi, Western Digital’s OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable platform gives us the flexibility, in a truly disaggregated environment, to allocate sharable, high-performance flash storage to different groups, labs and research teams when and where it is needed. This is a game-changer for us, allowing us to adapt more quickly to changing workloads and projects, and provision resources more purposefully and efficiently.”

 

“Western Digital is a valued partner of ours as we’re constantly looking for innovative storage solutions that uniquely suit our customers’ changing needs,” said Alain Wilmouth, CEO at 2CRSi. “2CRSi is excited to have engaged the ICM institute with Western Digital on this initiative. In an effort to keep pace with changing applications and IT demands, their OpenFlex NVMe-oF platform takes open composable infrastructure to the next level. We envision many other use cases leveraging this solution. It gives our customers the ability to adapt high-performance shared storage to a variety of workloads in a dynamic and real-time way.”  

 

Industry’s first Open Composable Compliance Lab

Western Digital is leading the charge in open CDI compatibility testing with a goal to provide customers with proven, interoperable solutions that can effectively adapt to a variety of applications and complex data workloads, without locking customers into proprietary vendor solutions. This flexibility necessitated the creation of the industry’s first Open Composable Compliance Lab. Designed in partnership with industry leaders like Broadcom and Mellanox, and with support from numerous key ecosystem players such as DriveScale, Kaminario, Xilinx and more, the lab extends Western Digital’s commitment to an open standards-based approach to help accelerate market adoption. This collaboration not only benefits the ecosystem community, but customers have more choice to transform their data centers into highly scalable and flexible environments.

 

“Western Digital is at the forefront of NVMe-oF storage for CDI,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s Data Center Systems business unit. “With the launch of our Open Composable Compliance Lab, we’re bringing our commitment to open standards and rigorous compatibility testing to the industry. It is clear we’re taking open CDI seriously and are applying best practices, not only with our OpenFlex platform, but throughout the ecosystem to ensure customers have proven, tested solutions they can buy with confidence.”

 

Western Digital also introduced two new additions to its data center systems portfolio – the Ultrastar Serv24-4N four-node NVMe all-flash, and the Ultrastar Serv24+6 hybrid storage server platforms. These flexible and scalable storage server building blocks provide IT architects, cloud providers and system integrators with extremely fast, dense and efficient shared storage with compute for SDS, HCI and edge environments.

 

As organizations contend with the never-ending tsunami of data, more and more IT leaders are turning toward cost-effective software-defined infrastructure, like SDS or HCI, to manage the complexities of storing, accessing, sharing and protecting data at scale. With most SDS and HCI benefits well known — such as lower cost, system scalability and hardware choice — industry analyst firm IDC predicts that the SDS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.7 percent through 2022. The HCI market is anticipated to grow at an even faster rate of 25.2 percent through 2022, according to IDC.  Addressing these growing market segments, Western Digital’s expanding portfolio of Ultrastar Serv platforms address the needs of a variety of use cases and environments, including remote office/branch offices (ROBO), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), edge/IoT and video surveillance environments, test/development environments, and to facilitate data backup and disaster recovery (DR). 

 

Ultrastar Serv24-4N Four-node NVMe All-Flash Storage Server Designed for HCI and Scale-Out SDS

Western Digital’s Ultrastar Serv24-4N is designed for high-performance HCI deployments for data-intensive applications that depend on fast, efficient storage. It combines high compute density with an optimized design that maximizes the speed of NVMe SSDs. Key highlights include:

 

·         Features four server nodes with each having dual CPUs with full, 24 PCIe lanes to six SSDs, extracting the full performance potential of NVMe.

·         Includes Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable Processor CPUs and chipset. Core count and power can be selected to match data workloads and meet data center efficiency requirements.

·         Maximizes networking performance with three x16 PCIe slots per node.

·         Delivers high availability and enterprise-class reliability with capacities up to 184TB raw. 

 

Ultrastar Serv24+6 High-density Storage Server Balancing Capacity and Performance for SDS

Ultrastar Serv24+6 is a powerful, high-density 2U hybrid storage server designed for data-intensive applications. Delivering the right balance of capacity and compute performance, its ideal SDS use cases include file services, media streaming, video surveillance, IoT data gathering, backup and archive, and big data analytics. Key highlights include:

 

• Maximizes capacity density with an innovative solution, providing 24 HDD bays in just 2U with the option of four additional HDD bays in the rear for a maximum capacity of up to 420TB raw.
• Offers a choice of the latest high-performance Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, allowing customers to match processing capability to their workloads and power budget.
• Provides the flexibility to choose SAS or SATA HDDs to balance application performance and cost requirements.
• Delivers hybrid support with up to six NVMe SSDs in the rear bays for a data-acceleration tier to improve application performance.

 

Both the Ultrastar Serv24-4N and Ultrastar Serv24+6 storage servers come with a five-year limited warranty. The Ultrastar Serv24-4N will be available this quarter in multiple configurations through the company’s worldwide network of distribution and channel partners. The Ultrastar Serv24+6 is sampling now and will be available in volume by September.

 

“Our goal is to help our customers architect highly efficient and cost-effective infrastructures to get the most value from their data—all without sacrificing performance, reliability or data availability,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s Data Center Systems business unit. “Whether customers are working with big data or fast data in small environments or in hyperscale cloud data centers, our complete portfolio of purpose-built storage solutions supports the most demanding performance and capacity needs while still providing the best TCO. Our new Ultrastar Serv platforms extend the value we offer to customers, enabling them to more effectively manage the complex world of data.”

 

“We have significantly deepened our customer base in the machine learning and HPC markets over the last year with our joint solution on Western Digital’s NVMe platforms and the Weka File System. Now, with their expanded portfolio of platforms, we’re fueling innovation and pushing boundaries across a wide spectrum of applications requiring ultra-high file system performance running on Western Digital’s Ultrastar Serv24-4N NVMe storage server,” said Barbara Murphy, vice president of marketing and products at WekaIO. “The WekaIO software, along with Western Digital’s NVMe platforms, delivers incredible economics driven by the right balance of high-performance flash and the highly efficient cost of petabyte-scale cloud object storage.”

 

“Customers need both convenience and maximum choice in scale-out block storage systems for ultra-demanding applications like transactional databases, data analytics, AI and machine learning. Western Digital provides both benefits with the option of incorporating Excelero’s NVMesh^® in its Ultrastar Serv24-4N storage server,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder of Excelero, a software-defined block storage disruptor. “As the fastest scale-out NVMe block storage on the market, NVMesh running on the Ultrastar Serv24-4N with its NVMe drives helps IT teams deploy and scale fast and efficiently as underlying demand grows.”

 

Become an Enterprise Channel Partner 

Western Digital also recently launched its enhanced Enterprise Partner Program with streamlined benefits, discounts and programs for its IntelliFlash™, ActiveScale™ and Ultrastar Platform brands. Solution and cloud providers are encouraged to apply for the award-winning Western Digital Enterprise Partner Program to access the comprehensive selection of go-to-market resources and sales incentives. With Western Digital’s broad data center portfolio, partners can easily create solutions and services to solve customer challenges while helping them grow their business and maximize profitability.

 

Western Digital has also introduced two new 96-layer 3D flash NVMe SSD families, the Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340. Both are purpose-built for either mixed-use-case workloads or very read-intensive applications, respectively. The new Ultrastar drives help meet the evolving, and increasingly specific workload demands placed on data centers today, while building a strong, flexible foundation for the zettabyte-scale era of the future. Leveraging Western Digital’s in-house SSD controller designs, firmware development and vertical integration, these new solutions underscore the company’s strengths in developing innovations that allow customers’ data to thrive, from edge to core to cloud.

 

NVMe is having a great impact on enterprises and what they can do with data, particularly for real-time analytics, M2M and IoT, and emerging technologies like composable infrastructure. Data center customers understand the nature of their data streams and application workloads and are realizing that today’s general-purpose architectures are inefficient and can carry resource and cost overhead. Ushering in new NVMe SSD innovations for the workload evolution, Western Digital’s new purpose-built solutions include:

 

Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSD Family for Mixed-Use-Case Workloads

The Ultrastar DC SN640 family is optimized for extreme performance for mixed-workload applications such as SQL Server^®, MySQL^®, virtual desktops, and other business-critical workloads using hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) such as VMware vSAN^® and Microsoft Azure^® Stack HCI solutions. It delivers 2x the performance in sequential writes compared to its predecessor. Supporting a variety of system designs, the new family comes in three form factors and offers a broad range of capacity points, including:   

 

• EDSFF E1.L with up to 30.72TB, designed to provide blazing speeds up to 720K random-read IOPS. This game-changing form factor is ideal for designing best petabyte/rack for new dense data-center designs. 
• U.2 7mm with up to 7.68TB, a popular form factor for storage servers, virtualized environments, and containerized applications using denser, power-efficient blade systems.
• M.2 22x110 with up to 3.84TB for constrained spaces and OCP-compliant hardware.

 

The Ultrastar DC SN640 is built on a proven architecture where cloud, enterprise, OEM, and channel partners can expect streamlined qualifications, and broad OS and hardware certifications for improving time-to-market designs. The Ultrastar DC SN640 family also delivers flexibility with tunable endurance and multiple security options. Delivering a competitive TCO, the drives lay the foundation to support data centers at zettabyte scale, utilizing NVMe multi-namespace management for designing future-generation architectures. Qualification samples are now available to select customers.

 

“We are pleased to be partnering with Western Digital to deliver compelling HCI solutions for hybrid-cloud workloads,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of VMware HCI Products, VMware. “HCI solutions leveraging the new Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe flash product, VMware^® Cloud Foundation, and VMware vSAN introduce compelling TCO and productivity gains for customers looking to modernize their infrastructure."

 

Ultrastar DC SN340 NVMe SSD Family for Very Read-Intensive Use Cases

The Ultrastar DC SN340 Gen3 x4 PCIe SSD is optimized for power efficiency and low heat signature with less than 7W at full performance. It is ideal for very read-intensive workloads such as warm storage and other applications that write in large block sizes. These include content delivery networks (CDN) and video caching, where data is written in large sequential blocks and which benefit significantly from the high-bandwidth of Gen3 x4 and low read latency of NVMe. Distributed NoSQL databases like Apache Cassandra^® and MongoDB^® can also take advantage of the large-block write characteristics of the drive. The Ultrastar DC SN340 comes in capacities of up to 7.68TB. The drive will be sampling to select customers this quarter.

 

“Customers are rapidly transitioning to a variety of purpose-built NVMe storage solutions to improve storage performance, efficiency, density and overall TCO,” said Eyal Bek, vice president of product marketing for Enterprise Devices at Western Digital. “It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all world. Our Ultrastar NVMe SSDs are based on our deep understanding of evolving workloads and trends within the data center and are aligned to our proven and reliable 96L NAND nodes. We take pride in knowing that our new Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340 SSDs are optimized to support the purpose-built workloads and data volume demands of today, while laying the foundation for the future of zettabyte scale.”