FMS: WD OpenFlex NVMe-oF Storage Platform With OpenFlex F3100 Fabric Device, OpenFlex E3000 Fabric Enclosure, and Composability API

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced innovations and an initiative to drive support and adoption of open, composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI).

OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric device

In addition to its OpenFlex NVMe-oF storage platform, architecture and open API, the company is driving broader industry support with the launch of the industry’s ‘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, NVMe-oF Open Composable storage platform
As a key NVMe-oF foundational building block of CDI, the firm’s OpenFlex platform provides the storage tools and resources for organizations taking a disaggregated approach to their SDS infrastructure. By disaggregating compute, storage and network into virtual resource pools, IT managers can 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%⁽¹⁾.

OpenFlex family includes:

OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric device rear

OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric device: A shared storage device providing up to 2.1 million IO/s, 11.7GB/s throughput, and latencies less than 48μs in a single NVMe-oF device. Each fabric device is available in capacities of up to 61TB, delivering extreme performance over two 50GbE ports.

Openflex D3000 Series Disk Fabric device

OpenFlex E3000 Series Fabric enclosure: A 3U enclosure that houses up to ten hot-swappable F3100 fabric devices. The combination of the OpenFlex E3000 fabric enclosure with up to ten OpenFlex F3100 fabric devices leads the industry in performance density for open composable platforms projecting up to 7.2 million IO/s per rack unit (RU) and 39GB/s/RU with a raw capacity density of 205TB/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, ICM Institute. “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, 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.“

Open Composable Compliance Lab
The company is leading the charge in open CDI compatibility testing with a goal to provide customers with interoperable solutions that can 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 companies like Broadcom, Inc. and Mellanox Technologies Ltd., and with support from numerous key ecosystem players such as DriveScale, Inc., Kaminario, Inc., Xilinx, Inc., the lab extends the firm’s commitment to an open standards-based approach to help accelerate market adoption. This collaboration benefits the ecosystem community and 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, SVP and GM, data center systems business unit, Western Digital. “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.“

At FMS, the company showcased its OpenFlex F3100 Fabric Device and E3000 Fabric Enclosure orchestrated by its open API, which has been contributed to OpenCompute.org for review.

The firm also showcased two computational storage workloads in a dynamic open composable ecosystem with Xilinx and Eideticom Communications, Inc.

In addition to the OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable infrastructure platform, the company’s full data center portfolio includes: Intelliflash family of hybrid flash and NVMe AFAs; ActiveScale cloud-scale object storage system; Ultrastar storage servers and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs.

⁽¹⁾ Based on internal estimates of utilization efficiencies and component pricing as of July 2018

Resources:
Blog: The Next Step in the Evolution of Composability
Tech Brief: OpenFlex NVMe-over-Fabric Architecture