WD/HGST Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD Certified for Virtual SAN and vSphere

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced that its HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD is certified for use with Vmware, Inc.‘s Virtual SAN and vSphere.

Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD

Optimized for easy set-up, the Ultrastar SN150 SSD for VMware environments reduces latency, and brings hyperscale-level performance and enhanced QoS time to virtualized servers and cloud storage. This can lower the TCO of VMware storage environments over traditional storage architectures by reducing performance tuning and field support costs. In server-side environments where VMware virtualization management is utilized, the Ultrastar SN150 is an option for data center managers building or deploying systems on VMware Virtual SAN or vSphere.

Part of company’s HGST-branded Ultrastar data center storage solutions family, the certified Ultrastar SN150 is available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor and is one of the first NVMe SSDs to utilize VMware’s in-box NVMe driver.

For data center administrators, this helps eliminate the hassle of time-consuming downloads and configurations, and allows faster deployment.

The Ultrastar SN150 drive is available in capacities ranging from 1,120GB to 3,820GB and offers speeds which exceed Virtual SAN’s highest performance class (Class F) specifications, enabling it to address the heaviest data workloads in a variety of virtualized server and storage configurations, including all-flash and hybrid configurations utilizing flash for caching and HDD drives for storage capacity.

“Our Ultrastar SN150 PCIe drive is one of the most effective ways for data centers to extend their virtualization IT infrastructure, offering consistently high performance, with very low latency and the speed of NVMe,” said Anand Jayapalan, VP, enterprise and client compute solutions marketing, Western Digital. “With its certification, we further broaden Western Digital’s unmatched portfolio of VMware-certified storage solutions for IT administrators managing the growing data needs of their most demanding cloud, hyperscale and enterprise applications in all-flash and hybrid Virtual SAN environments.”

“Customers racing to meet dynamic business demands look for strong business partners to simplify the adoption of new technologies,” said Lee Caswell, VP, products, storage and availability business unit, VMware. “We have partnered with Western Digital to integrate the price-performance benefits of the Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD with the leading hyperconverged product, VMware Virtual SAN. Our low-risk in-box certified driver approach delights customers and reduces risk for partners.“

Compared to commonly used Virtual SAN-certified SAS products, the NVMe-based Ultrastar SN150 drive can deliver up to nearly four times the IO/s performance for 4K random reads and nearly twice the IO/s performance for 4K random writes ⁽¹⁾. Coupled with its low latency (~20μs), Ultrastar SN150 SSDs are designed to give predictable performance.

They are well-suited for latency-sensitive OLTP database workloads, fast virtual desktops, and mixed workloads environments running databases and latency-sensitive applications where response time is critical, such as e-commerce, financial applications and in-house applications such as e-mail.

The Ultrastar SN150 drive is the latest addition to the firm’s portfolio of storage solutions for VMware environments. The company and its family of WD, HGST and SanDisk brands offers more than 200 different storage devices, software solutions and configurations certified for vSphere and Virtual SAN, including Fusion ioMemory PCIe SSDs, SanDisk Lightning II SAS SSDs, Ultrastar 7K6000 enterprise HDD, FlashSoft 4 for vSphere APIs for IO Filtering,. The products are utilized in all of the top 10 VMmark benchmarks for vSphere, including the latest #1 benchmark published this month ^(2).

Features and specs

Certified for use on vSphere and Virtual SAN platforms
Enterprise-grade reliability: Flash-aware RAID, end-to-end data-path protection, ECC, secure erase, power fail protection
Supports the PCIe Gen 3.0 server platforms
Classified at the highest performance category (Class F) for Virtual SAN
Available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor