Western Digital releases NVMe SSDs for data centers

Western Digital markets an Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSD (PCIe 3.1) and NVMe-oF RapidFlex controllers to collectively form its latest NVMe-oF OpenFlex Data24 storage platform. SSD and controllers are available now. The platform will be available this fall, covered by a five-year limited warranty.

This is the 3.1 generation Ultrastar DC SN840 from Western Digital. Equipped with an in-house NVMe controller, with firmware and 96-layer TLC 3D NAND technology. On the performance side, the SSD reaches up to 780K / 250K in IOPS (random read / write operations) and a maximum capacity of 15.36TB, all in a 15mm U.2 format. Endurance levels 1 and 3 for writing to NAND flash (DW / D), power failure protection and TCG encryption, are some of the dedicated business features of this system.

Better performance in data centers

While NVMe Flash storage offers real performance advantages for DAS, SAN and NAS, the same cannot be said for traditional data center infrastructures. OpenFlex Data24 must address these issues as the bandwidth of Ultrastar NVMe SSDs is fully shared by multiple hosts through an Ethernet interconnect fabric, with low latency, as if they were locally connected to the PCIe bus of x86 servers. This provides more flexibility to expand data center capacity and make more efficient use of disaggregated flash storage, thus meeting the needs of the heaviest workloads.

OpenFlex Data24 accommodates up to 24 hot-swappable Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs, representing 368TB of storage capacity, in a compact 2U form factor. The solution natively integrates NVMe-oF RapidFlex RDMA controllers, ensuring measured power consumption, which allows six hosts to connect directly to 100Gb Ethernet ports without the need for an external switch. RapidFlex controllers deliver less than 500 nanoseconds latency across platforms, with performance reaching 13 million IOPS / 70 GB / s when adding six networks to Western Digital’s platform. OpenFlex Data24 can also be connected as a shared storage pool within high performance infrastructures, or used as a disaggregated resource to compose virtual storage systems.