FMS: WD Ultrastar DC SN640 and SN340 96-Layer 3D Flash NVMe SSDs

Western Digital Corp. (WDC) announced two 96-layer 3D flash NVMe SSD families, the Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340.

Both are purpose-built for either mixed-use-case workloads or read-intensive applications, respectively.

The Ultrastar drives help meet the evolving, and increasingly specific workload demands placed on data centers today, while building a strong, flexible foundation for the zettabyte-scale era of the future. They leverage the company’s in-house SSD controller designs, firmware development and vertical integration.

NVMe is having an impact on enterprises and what they can do with data, particularly for real-time analytics, M2M and IoT, and emerging technologies like composable infrastructure. Data center customers understand the nature of their data streams and application workloads and are realizing that today’s general-purpose architectures are inefficient and can carry resource and cost overhead.

Ushering in NVMe SSD innovations for workload evolution, purpose-built solutions include:

Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSD family for mixed-use-case workloads
The Ultrastar DC SN640 family is optimized for performance for mixed-workload applications such as SQL Server, MySQL, virtual desktops, and other business-critical workloads using hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) such as VMware vSAN and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions. It delivers 2x the performance in sequential writes compared to its predecessor. Supporting a variety of system designs, this family comes in 3 factors and offers a range of capacity points, including:

EDSFF E1.L with up to 30.72TB, designed to provide up to 720,000 random-read IO/s. This game-changing form factor is for designing petabyte/rack for dense data-center designs.
U.2 7mm with up to 7.68TB, a form factor for storage servers, virtualized environments, and containerized applications using denser, power-efficient blade systems.
M.2 22×110 with up to 3.84TB for constrained spaces and OCP-compliant hardware.

The Ultrastar DC SN640 is built on an architecture where cloud, enterprise, OEM, and channel partners can expect streamlined qualifications, and broad OS and hardware certifications for improving time-to-market designs. This family also delivers flexibility with tunable endurance and multiple security options. Delivering a competitive TCO, the drives lay the foundation to support data centers at zettabyte scale, utilizing NVMe multi-namespace management for designing future-generation architectures. Qualification samples are available to select customers.

“We are pleased to be partnering with Western Digital to deliver compelling HCI solutions for hybrid-cloud workloads,” said Lee Caswell, VP, VMware HCI products, VMware, Inc. “HCI solutions leveraging the Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe flash product, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware vSAN introduce compelling TCO and productivity gains for customers looking to modernize their infrastructure.“

Ultrastar DC SN340 NVMe SSD family for read-intensive use cases

The Ultrastar DC SN340 Gen3 x4 PCIe SSD is optimized for power efficiency and low heat signature with less than 7W at full performance. It is for read-intensive workloads such as warm storage and other applications that write in large block sizes. These include CDN and video caching, where data is written in large sequential blocks and which benefit from the high-bandwidth of Gen3 x4 and low read latency of NVMe. Distributed NoSQL databases like Apache Cassandra and MongoDB can also take advantage of the large-block write characteristics of the drive. The Ultrastar DC SN340 comes in capacities of up to 7.68TB. The drive will be sampling to select customers this quarter.

“Customers are rapidly transitioning to a variety of purpose-built NVMe storage solutions to improve storage performance, efficiency, density and overall TCO,” said Eyal Bek, VP, product marketing, enterprise devices, WD. “It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all world. Our Ultrastar NVMe SSDs are based on our deep understanding of evolving workloads and trends within the data center and are aligned to our proven and reliable 96L NAND nodes. We take pride in knowing that our new Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340 SSDs are optimized to support the purpose-built workloads and data volume demands of today, while laying the foundation for the future of zettabyte scale.“

These NVMe SSDs complement the company’s data center portfolio, including the IntelliFlash hybrid, all-flash and NVMe all-flash storage arrays; ActiveScale cloud-scale object storage system; OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar storage servers and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs.