Western Digital today announced new solutions that provide the foundation for next-generation data infrastructures designed around Ultrastar NVMe SSDs and supercharged by NVMe-oF.
Western Digital Intros New NVMe & NVMe-oF SSDs - Transforming The Enterprise Storage Landscape
The new dual-port, performance Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs and in-house RapidFlex NVMe-oF controllers are standalone solutions that combine to create the new OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform, a new shared storage JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) enclosure that extends the value of NVMe to multiple hosts over a low-latency Ethernet fabric network.
Extending Western Digital's leadership in dual-port architecture, the new performance Ultrastar DC SN840 Gen3.1 NVMe SSD is the company's third-generation solution with a vertically integrated in-house NVMe controller, firmware and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND technology. The new Ultrastar NVMe SSD enables enterprise customers to seamlessly transition from SATA and SAS to NVMe—delivering a competitive performance of up to 780K/250K random read/write IOPS and capacities up to 15.36TB in a drop-in U.2 15mm form factor.
Its comprehensive set of enterprise-class features includes 1 and 3 DW/D endurance levels, full power-loss protection, and TCG encryption. Future-ready, it is the ideal solution for a growing number of mission-critical applications that require superior read/write and mixed workload performance, low latency and dual-port high availability—everything from high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, SQL/NoSQL databases, virtualization (VMs/containers), AI/ML and data analytics.
More Than 360TB Worth Of Storage Can Be Fit In A 2U Server With oF NVMe Storage Devices
While NVMe Flash-based storage provides enormous performance gains for DAS, SAN, and NAS, traditional data center infrastructure can limit the full potential of NVMe SSDs, resulting in underutilization of valuable storage resources, inefficient data silos, and costly operational expenses.
The Western Digital OpenFlex Data24 helps address these challenges by enabling the full bandwidth of Ultrastar NVMe SSDs to be shared by multiple hosts over a low-latency Ethernet fabric as if they were locally attached to the PCIe bus inside x86 servers. This provides greater flexibility for data center operators to scale-up capacity and more efficiently utilize disaggregated Flash storage to achieve greater performance for the most demanding workloads.
Launching with up to 24 hot-swappable Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs, OpenFlex Data24 provides shared storage capacity of up to 368TB in a compact 2U form factor, making it ideal for server storage expansion and scale-out software-defined storage (SDS) environments. The holistic design also incorporates newly branded RapidFlex RDMA-enabled NVMe-oF controllers for unsurpassed network connectivity and extremely low power, allowing up to six hosts to be directly attached with 100Gb Ethernet without the need for an external switch.
RapidFlex controllers provide sub-500 nanosecond latency for projected platform performance topping 13M IOPS/70GB/s when adding up to six network adapters to the OpenFlex Data24. Built for high availability and enterprise-class reliability, the OpenFlex Data24 can be attached as shared storage in high-performance infrastructure deployments or utilized as a disaggregated resource to compose virtual storage systems. The platform is fully interoperable with the award-winning OpenFlex F-series – the only open composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) solution in the world.
Shipments for the Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSD will begin next month and the OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform is scheduled to ship in the Fall with a five-year limited warranty. RapidFlex NVMe-oF controllers are available now.
