The News: Western Digital continues with data center solutions based on disaggregated storage. Read the announcement from Western Digital here.
Western Digital Announces New Disaggregated Data Center Solutions
Analyst Take: Western Digital has released new solutions for the data center that continue the company’s investment in disaggregated storage solutions. The announcement shows the long-term commitment and investment in data center offerings focused on enterprise storage. There are three different, but related areas covered in the August 8 announcement that coincided with the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California.
- OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF JBOF Storage Platform allows sharing of NVMe flash SSDs in enterprise environments over a low-latency Ethernet fabric. Six servers can be directly attached without requiring a switch, enabling use of the high-performance storage as a common resource. 24 dual-ported SSDs offer a maximum of 368 TB in a 2U enclosure with NVMe-oF/RoCE connectivity are included in the OpenFlex Data24.
- RapidFlex NVMe-oF A2000 controller is a PCIe-based fabric bridge to allow external NVMe SSDs to be shared as if they were internal to server SSDs connected on the PCIe bus. The value for customers is that the difference in the technology change rate between servers and SSDs can be accommodated with the external attachment, allowing the servers to be technology refreshed while leaving the data in place on the longer-lifespan SSDs. This capability addresses an economic and operational issue with technology updating with SSDs in the server chassis.
- Ultrastar DC SN655 NVMe enterprise SSD is a dual-port device offering PCIe Gen4 attachment using TLC 3D NAND for standard 2.5” enclosures. Support for U.2 and U.3 backplane is included and a 5-year warranty. This is a high-capacity SSD with required low latency and high IOPs for enterprise use.
Key Takeaways: Western Digital Continues with Disaggregated Storage for Enterprises
One of the big takeaways from the announcement is the continuation of products for Western Digital’s disaggregated storage initiative. These represent investment and advances from their earlier offerings.
As the competition continues to innovate in this market as well, we expect Western Digital to continue to deliver regular updates on their existing line and new offerings as well. Customers and integrators will have more confidence in solutions from Western Digital than from vendors only recently in the market or without substantial commitment.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Randy draws from over 35 years of experience in helping storage companies design and develop products. As a partner at Evaluator Group and now The Futurum Group, he spends much of his time advising IT end-user clients on architectures and acquisitions.
Previously, Randy was Vice President of Storage and Planning at Sun Microsystems. He also developed disk and tape systems for the mainframe attachment at IBM, StorageTek, and two startup companies. Randy also designed disk systems at Fujitsu and Tandem Computers.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Randy served as the CTO for ProStor, where he brought products to market addressing a long-term archive for Information Technology and the Healthcare and Media/Entertainment markets.
He has also written numerous industry articles and papers as an educator and presenter, and he is the author of two books: Planning a Storage Strategy and Information Archiving – Economics and Compliance. The latter is the first book of its kind to explore information archiving in depth. Randy regularly teaches classes on Information Management technologies in the U.S. and Europe.
