Western Digital Broadens NVMe Data Center Portfolio, Enabling Next-Gen Infrastructure From Edge-to-Core

Western Digital Corp. announced two additions to its broad portfolio of NVMe-based systems, platforms, SSDs, and memory drives for data center and cloud customers.

With a portfolio covering applications from edge-to-core, these additions are the Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN630 NVMe SSD and the CL SN720 NVMe SSD. Each leverages the power of company’s vertical integration capabilities, including internally developed controller and firmware architectures, and 64-layer 3D NAND technology.

As a replacement for lower-performing SATA SSDs, these new NVMe drives meet the need for performance, scalability, endurance and low TCO for public and private cloud deployments, hyperscale cloud environments, and next-generation workloads at the edge.

IT managers face challenges such as managing multiple workload types, scaling at optimal TCO, and controlling server sprawl. Due to its inherent scalability and performance benefits, NVMe is becoming the standard for everything from traditional scale-up database applications to emerging edge computing architectures.

“For our cloud and hyperscale customers, performance, economics, and endurance at scale are paramount,” said Eyal Bek, VP, data center and client computing devices, Western Digital. “The Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD and Western Digital CL SN720 SSD, both of which leverage our internally developed SSD architectures and 3D NAND, can help our customers step up from SATA to NVMe performance as they position their data centers for the future.”

“Our strong partnership with Western Digital brings compelling flash performance and cost innovations to the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure industry,” said Lee Caswell, VP products, storage and availability, VMware, Inc. “The combination of new Western Digital NVMe products, optimized for cloud and software-defined storage applications, with the award-winning VMware vSAN software can improve TCO and productivity for customers building out modern infrastructure.”

Ultrastar DC SN630 NVMe SSD is a 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) enterprise-grade NVMe SSD optimized for cloud storage, which delivers more than three times* the IO/s for mixed workloads compared with legacy SATA drives. It enables cloud architects to increase performance for latency-sensitive workloads while providing QoS. Recognizing the need for purpose-built storage with varying endurance requirements, it will be available in two configurations. For mixed-use workloads, the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD comes in capacities between 800GB and 6.4TB with two drive-writes per day (2DWD), and for read-intensive workloads, capacities are available from 960GB to 7.68TB with 0.8DWD, making it to accelerate applications, including software-defined or hyper-converged infrastructures, OLAP, media streaming, and the growing IoT segment where low latency is paramount.

CL SN720 NVMe SSD is an NVMe SSD purpose-built for the performance requirements of boot and edge applications. It enables high random read IO/s performance, endurance with encryption capabilities, and extended enterprise validation for server operating systems’ boot and edge data center applications. With capacities from 256GB to 2TB in the M.2 form factor, tIt is designed for edge servers, content delivery networks, cloud-based gaming, and IoT platforms and gateways.

Both products are based on Western Digital’s BiCS3, 64-layer 3D TLC NAND technology. The CL SN720 is shipping now. The Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD is currently sampling with select customers with broad availability expected in March 2019.

The new NVMe SSDs complement company’s data center portfolio, including the IntelliFlash hybrid, all-flash and NVMe all-flash storage systems; ActiveScale petabyte-scale, hybrid-cloud object storage system; OpenFlex NVMe-over-fabric (NVMf) open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar sever and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center HDDs and SSDs.

*IO/s performance representative of 1.92TB version of the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD using the mixed 70/30 workload.