FMS 2020: WD Expands Flash Portfolio

Building on a diverse product portfolio across HDD and flash, Western Digital Corp. announced a suite of NVMe SSDs for enabling next-gen, data-centric architectures for data centers, industrial IoT, automotive and client applications.

The new family includes the Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD for designing a more efficient data center storage tier with competitive TCO; the IX SN530 Industrial SSD for the extreme environments of industrial and automotive applications; and the 2TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD for speeding up PC performance.

Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD

Digital IX SN530 NVMe SSD

The firm leverages its vertical integration capabilities – from designing and manufacturing its NAND flash to developing its own in-house SSD controllers and firmware.

Enabling Efficient Data Center Architectures
The amount of data created over the next 3 years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years, according to IDC. Billions of connected systems will generate a myriad of contextualized data sets from smart video to consumer and sensor data, which must be captured, transformed and analyzed to bring value to industries, businesses and people. Legacy architectures cannot keep up with today’s data-intensive environments. The challenge is how to efficiently and cost-effectively build the data infrastructure that will keep up with data demands of the zettabyte-scale era. Storage is critical  to creating these new architectures and extracting value from data.

Zoned Storage is the new storage architecture for the next-gen enterprise data center. In addition to championing the Zoned Storage Initiative, and contributing to the NVMe Working Group ZNS spec and the Linux open-source community to further ecosystem development, Western Digital announced that it is now sampling the new Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD to select customers.

The Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS SSD includes a vertically integrated, dual-port, HA NVMe controller with capacities up to 8TB in a standard U.2 form-factor. Leveraging ZNS, an industry standard spec, it is a new gen of SSD suited for multi-tenancy environments and other data-centric applications such as event stream processing. Compared to conventional SSDs, the drive delivers up to 4x performance and 2.5x QoS improvements, as well as better efficiency, utilization, and scale while lowering TCO for public and private cloud infrastructure.

The company is committed to the development of a Zoned Storage ecosystem and application support, which includes managing the synergies of high-capacity SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs under a standardized unified Zoned Storage framework.

Empowering Data-Intensive Industrial IoT and Automotive
Designs The IX SN530 is an industrial-grade NVMe SSD designed for the extreme temperature, performance, high-endurance and reliability requirements found in automotive and industrial applications. For factory automation, transportation, medical, robotics, drones, defense, retail and other rugged edge environments, it features an operating temperature range from -40°C to +85°C, and delivers a 20G operating vibration spec. With read performance of up to 2,400MB/s, it is the high-performance solution for OEMs designing new applications or transitioning from SATA SSDs. It is available in M.2 2230 or M.2 2280 form factors with capacity points from 85GB to 2TB. The IX SN530 TLC family is now sampling. SLC versions will be available in January 2021.

Bringing 2TB Capacity and Speed to Content Creators
The WD Blue portfolio now offers the WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD in a 2TB drive, bringing a higher-capacity NVMe solution to content creators, including graphic designers, animators, videographers, architects and software developers. Whether creating digital art, using CAD software or in post-production, this SSD delivers over 4x the speed of company’s fastest SATA drives. It is available for purchase at select firm’s retailers, e-tailers, resellers, system integrators and at the WD store for $249.99 MSRP.

“Companies across every major industry and every vertical market are using flash technology to transform their businesses. The future of storage is application centric, and optimized for those businesses,” said Robert Soderbery, EVP and GM, Western Digital’s flash business. “We are launching new SSD products for cloud, enterprise storage, industrial and client computing applications. These new SSDs are critical building blocks for our digital world, enabled by new architectures, giving a variety of customers more options than ever to ensure their data is fast, secure and protected.”

Related Western Digital blogs:
• ZNS SSDs Just Got Real – the Ultrastar DC ZN540
• NVMe Spec Ratification and New ZNS Milestones