Western Digital: CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA and Ultrastar SN100 PCIe NVMe SSD for VMware

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) announced that two of its compelling data center devices are certified for use with VMware, Inc. environments ⁽¹⁾, including the capacity SanDisk-branded CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD and the HGST-branded Ultrastar SN100 PCIe (PCIe) NVMe SSD, which was rated in VMware’s performance class ⁽²⁾.

CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD

Either used independently or together for enhanced data center benefits, these SSDs bring performance and rapid responsiveness to virtual desktops, databases, e-mail, cloud services, and other business-critical applications. The company will showcase the certified SSDs and multiple all-flash Virtual SAN Ready Nodes that were created in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) at VMware Europe.

Ultrastar SN100 PCIe NVMe SSD

The two SSDs join company’s portfolio of more than 200 WD-, HGST- and SanDisk-branded NVMe, SATA and SAS SSDs, software and HDD drives (HDDs) certified for vSphere, Virtual SAN or VMware Cloud Foundation.

“With the certifications of our CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD and NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100, Western Digital’s portfolio offers the broadest range of solutions to optimize CPU and storage resources against virtualized workloads, and addresses the full spectrum of customer use cases,” said Anand Jayapalan, VP, marketing, enterprise and client compute solutions, Western Digital. “Through our OEM and channel partners, we are enabling new VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes that provide complete hyper converged infrastructure systems specially designed with many of our customers’ most important data challenges in mind. We provide IT managers with unparalleled options – whether they are building their own software-defined storage or deploying Ready Nodes in existing and new cloud environments.“

Ultrastar SN100 SSDs and CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SSDs are designed to address the demand for all-flash and hybrid data centers. Using a combination of the NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100 SSD for caching and SATA-based CloudSpeed SATA SSDs for capacity allows users to create a high-performance all-flash Virtual SAN optimized to manage heavy and/or unpredictable web traffic in cloud environments. The CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II can also be used as a reliable and economical cache tier with the HGST-branded Ultrastar Helium platform HDDs for capacity in a Virtual SAN node to address different price points for data warehousing, corporate file systems, backup, and archiving.

The Ultrastar SN100 SSD is suited for large data centers and cloud service environments with massive and/or mixed-workloads. Offering up to 3.2TB ⁽³⁾ of capacity and the speed of NVMe, it delivers low-latency, predictable performance for intensive applications, enabling data centers in VMware environments to process more transactions per second, while decreasing the IT resources needed to support them. The Ultrastar SN100 SSD features VMware’s in-box NVMe driver and is available in a 2.5-inch form factor.

The CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SSD enables hybrid and private cloud service providers to deploy cost-effective flash storage capacity to address increased data volume. This can allow data centers in VMware environments to deliver services for a wider range of customers and improve the diversity of applications they support, while keeping TCO low. It is available in capacities ranging from approximately 480GB ⁽⁴⁾ to nearly 2TB ⁽⁵⁾. It offers highly reliable throughput, with sequential read speeds of up to 530MB/s⁽⁶⁾, all with low power consumption and data loss protection.

“We are working closely with Western Digital to accelerate flash adoption across the software-defined data center,” said Lee Caswell, VP, products, storage and availability business unit, VMware. “The new Virtual SAN Ready Nodes and certifications of the CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD and Ultrastar SN100 PCIe NVMe SSD make incorporating the benefits of enterprise flash easy for businesses looking to regain competitive advantage with IT.“

WDC Virtual SAN Ready Nodes for VMware environments Available Through HPE
The company collaborated with HPE to introduce five ways for VMware data center customers to cost-effectively extend to their storage possibilities utilizing SAS extenders and the SanDisk-branded Lightning series SAS SSDs. The all-flash Virtual SAN Ready Nodes – which offer tested and validated configurations and bundles of solutions – provide potential benefits, including the ability to incorporate 33.6TB of flash storage capacity and management of a variety of applications and workloads. Specific ready node models include: AF-6: HPE DL360 Gen9; AF-6: HPE DL380 Gen9; AF-8: HPE DL360 Gen9; AF-8: HPE DL380 Gen9; and AF8: DL380Gen9AF8-3.

The two certified SSDs are available.

⁽¹⁾ VMware VCG Virtual SAN
⁽²⁾ Certified to exceed Class F specifications
⁽³⁾ One terabyte (TB) = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Actual user storage is less.
⁽⁴⁾ One gigabyte (GB) = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Actual user storage is less.
⁽⁵⁾ Actual capacity 1.92TB
⁽⁶⁾ Based on internal testing