Western Digital’s New NVMe™ SSDs and NVMe-oF™ Solutions Provide the Foundation for Next-Generation, Agile Data Infrastructures

News highlights:

• New dual-port, performance Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSD is the company's third-generation solution designed to accelerate cloud compute, servers running mission-critical workloads, and high-availability external storage solutions.

• New OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform extends the performance of Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs across a low-latency Ethernet data fabric, providing the flexibility for hyperscale, OEM and enterprise IT customers to more effectively scale-up capacity and share disaggregated Flash storage resources.

• RapidFlex controllers incorporated in OpenFlex Data24 provide seamless NVMe/NVMe-oF connectivity with outstanding performance and extreme power efficiency. First Western Digital solution to integrate newly branded technology from the Kazan Networks acquisition.

• Vertically integrated NVMe SSDs and storage enclosures enable data infrastructure leaders to transition from SAS or SATA to NVMe for highly efficient, scalable and low-latency infrastructure to power applications and workloads requiring superior read/write performance and availability.

Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced new solutions that provide the foundation for next-generation data infrastructures designed around Ultrastar NVMe™ SSDs and supercharged by NVMe-oF™. Building upon the company's innovative design and integration capabilities – from NAND Flash to storage platforms – the new dual-port, performance Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs and in-house RapidFlex NVMe-oF controllers are standalone solutions that combine to create the new OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform, a new shared storage JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) enclosure that extends the value of NVMe to multiple hosts over a low-latency Ethernet fabric network. These new solutions further expand Western Digital's data center portfolio to help customers transition to higher efficiency NVMe SSDs and more advanced shared storage architectures to meet the evolving demands of performance-driven applications and workloads.

In today's global digital economy, microseconds count. As hyperscale cloud and enterprise data centers constantly work to remove bottlenecks to ensure uncompromised performance and availability of essential applications, while also keeping pace with unprecedented data growth, customer adoption of NVMe and NVMe-oF solutions continues to accelerate. Industry analyst firm IDC expects hyperscalers, OEMs and end-user IT organizations to continue to transition away from legacy SATA and SAS interfaces, with NVMe on track to reach more than 55 percent of total enterprise SSD units shipped in 2020 and grow at a 2018-2023 CAGR of 38 percent¹.

"The future of Flash is undoubtedly NVMe as it's all about speed, efficiency, capacity and cost-effective scalability, and NVMe-oF takes it to the next level," said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president at IDC. "Many high-performance applications have quickly become mainstay drivers of key business functions and we can expect this to further expand NVMe in data centers for global enterprises. With Western Digital's long history of NAND Flash innovation and an integrated portfolio of NVMe SSDs and new data fabrics solutions, the company is well positioned to help customers fully embrace NVMe and get the most out of their storage assets."

Ultrastar DC SN840 Data Center NVMe SSD
Extending Western Digital's leadership in dual-port architecture, the new performance Ultrastar DC SN840 Gen3.1 NVMe SSD is the company's third-generation solution with a vertically integrated in-house NVMe controller, firmware and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND technology. The new Ultrastar NVMe SSD enables enterprise customers to seamlessly transition from SATA and SAS to NVMe—delivering competitive performance of up to 780K/250K random read/write IOPS and capacities up to 15.36TB in a drop-in U.2 15mm form factor. Its comprehensive set of enterprise-class features includes 1 and 3 DW/D endurance levels, full power-loss protection and TCG encryption. Future-ready, it is the ideal solution for a growing number of mission-critical applications that require superior read/write and mixed workload performance, low latency and dual-port high availability—everything from high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, SQL/NoSQL databases, virtualization (VMs/containers), AI/ML and data analytics.

"Being the leader in high performance storage for AI and big data, DDN needs to stay at the leading edge of storage technologies," said Paul Bloch, president and co-founder of DDN. "We are fortunate to have an innovative partner like Western Digital to deliver NVMe-based all-flash solutions that maximize device performance so we can deliver application acceleration to our customers. We look forward to implementing the Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSD in our solutions."

OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform
While NVMe Flash-based storage provides enormous performance gains for DAS, SAN and NAS, traditional data center infrastructure can limit the full potential of NVMe SSDs, resulting in underutilization of valuable storage resources, inefficient data silos and costly operational expenses. OpenFlex Data24 helps address these challenges by enabling the full bandwidth of Ultrastar NVMe SSDs to be shared by multiple hosts over a low-latency Ethernet fabric as if they were locally attached to the PCIe bus inside x86 servers. This provides greater flexibility for data center operators to scale-up capacity and more efficiently utilize disaggregated Flash storage to achieve greater performance for the most demanding workloads.

Launching with up to 24 hot-swappable Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs, OpenFlex Data24 provides shared storage capacity of up to 368TB in a compact 2U form factor, making it ideal for server storage expansion and scale-out software-defined storage (SDS) environments. The holistic design also incorporates newly branded RapidFlex RDMA-enabled NVMe-oF controllers for unsurpassed network connectivity and extreme low power, allowing up to six hosts to be directly attached with 100Gb Ethernet without the need for an external switch. RapidFlex controllers provide sub-500 nanosecond latency for projected platform performance topping 13M IOPS/70GB/s when adding up to six network adapters to the OpenFlex Data24.

Built for high availability and enterprise-class reliability, the OpenFlex Data24 can be attached as shared storage in high-performance infrastructure deployments or utilized as a disaggregated resource to compose virtual storage systems. The platform is fully interoperable with the award-winning OpenFlex F-series – the only open composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) solution in the world.

"Data infrastructure has never been as vital to the world's economy as it is today," said Yusuf Jamal, senior vice president of Western Digital's Devices and Platforms Business. "As a leading provider of essential data infrastructure, our mission is to help enterprises architect next-generation data centers to support business-critical applications and bandwidth-hungry workloads at scale. Western Digital's leadership in NAND Flash, capacity-enterprise HDDs and supporting technologies are being relied upon now more than ever. We're fully committed to helping companies transition to NVMe and move to new composable architectures that can maximize the value of their data storage resources."

Shipments for the Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSD will begin next month and the OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform is scheduled to ship in the Fall with a five-year limited warranty. RapidFlex NVMe-oF controllers are available now.

Western Digital Blog: From NVMe to NVMe-oF – Why Now is the Time
Webinar: OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF Storage Platform Announcement

Western Digital continuously innovates, pushing the boundaries of science and technology to deliver products that enable greater data infrastructure efficiency and productivity with best-in-class TCO. Its broad data center portfolio includes its family of Ultrastar HDDs and SSDs; WD Gold® HDDs and SSDs; OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar storage platforms; RapidFlex NVMe-oF controllers; and the Ultrastar memory extension drive. Western Digital is also championing Zoned Storage, an open-source, standards-based initiative building upon the synergies of SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs that enables data centers to scale efficiently.

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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.

¹IDC Worldwide Solid State Drive Forecast, 2020–2024, May 2020, Doc # US45172620

One terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Actual user capacity may vary depending on operating environment.

© 2020 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, OpenFlex, RapidFlex, Ultrastar and WD Gold are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. 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 are available in all regions of the world.

Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including the expected availability, benefits, capabilities, capacity, performance, speed and/or other features of Western Digital NVMe SSD, controller, and enclosure solutions and changes to the market for those products. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: changes to specifications from standards organizations, volatility in global economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance and cost of commodity materials and specialized product components; actions by competitors; unexpected advances in competing technologies; our development and introduction of products based on new technologies and expansion into new data storage markets; risks associated with acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), including the company's most recently filed periodic report, to which your attention is directed. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.