Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) has been selected as one of the winners of Storage Magazine's prestigious Products of the Year Awards for 2019. The company's OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric Device was recognized as "groundbreaking" and "the most composable" product in the Hyperconverged (HCI) and Composable Infrastructures category, highlighting impressive performance and density, innovative hardware design and open API. According to TechTarget editors, the OpenFlex F3100 "offers a look at what is, perhaps, the future of hyperconvergence by disaggregating storage from servers over NVMe-oF."

Now in its 18th year, the enterprise data storage Products of the Year Awards compare the best technology hardware, software and services offerings available across five categories. TechTarget's expert panel of analysts, consultants and end users judged this year's entrants based on technological innovation, performance, ease of integration into enterprise IT environments, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value.

Products that were selected for the HCI and Composable Infrastructures category included solutions that combine storage, compute and virtualization resources for management as a single system through a common tool set. Composable systems and software that use a unifying API to disaggregate and manage shared pools of physical resources also qualified.

As described by judges, "OpenFlex's disaggregated architecture embraces open source to scale across public and private clouds. Impressive performance and density in a 3U all-flash array, the system is the only NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) award winner in this category. Disaggregating storage from servers by using NVMe-oF will certainly improve storage utilization and performance balancing." One judge stated that the OpenFlex F3100 was singled out "given how critical NVMe-oF will be to future composable infrastructure designs," adding that "the support of an open API is also very innovative and makes the adoption of composable infrastructure far more realistic."

The OpenFlex platform provides a new architectural approach to software-defined storage (SDS) infrastructure, enabling storage, networking, and compute to be disaggregated into shareable resource pools. Combined with an open standards-based, scalable and easy-to-use Open Composability API, OpenFlex helps IT Managers better provision on the fly with simplified operations, eliminate underutilized resources and reduce TCO by up to 40 percent¹ when compared to hyperconverged infrastructure. The OpenFlex F3100 NVMe-oF storage device provides blazing-fast speeds up to 2.1 million IOPS, 11.7 GBps throughput, and latencies less than 48 microseconds. Each fabric-attached device is available in capacities of up to 61TB², delivering extreme performance over two 50 gigabit Ethernet ports.

"Western Digital is fully committed to driving ecosystem-wide support and adoption of open composable infrastructure, and OpenFlex is the NVMe-oF foundational building block to help enterprises optimize their data storage environments," said Kurt Chan, vice president and general manager, Data Center Platforms at Western Digital. "It's a great honor to have OpenFlex among this year's Products of the Year award winners as it further validates our innovation and efforts to enable open, next-generation IT infrastructures."

In addition to the OpenFlex platform, Western Digital's full data center portfolio includes: Ultrastar® storage servers and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs.

Resources:
Blog: The Next Step in the Evolution of Composability
Data Sheet: OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric Device

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About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. As a leader in data infrastructure, the company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data. Our data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital®, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, and WD® brands.

¹ Based on internal estimates of utilization efficiencies and component pricing as of July 2018
² One GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to storage capacity. Accessible capacity will vary from the stated capacity due to operating environment.

© 2020 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, SanDisk, WD, OpenFlex and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. The NVMe and NVMe-oF word marks are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change without notice. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. Not all products will be available in all regions of the world.