Western Digital Unleashes the Fastest NVMe-oF™ Open Composable Platform for Shared Accelerated Storage

Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced new innovations and a leadership initiative to drive greater support and adoption of open, composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). In addition to its OpenFlex NVMe-oF storage platform, architecture and open API, Western Digital is driving broader industry support with the launch of the industry's first Open Composable Compliance Lab, a multi-vendor ecosystem of compute, storage and networking to help test and validate end-to-end interoperability among solutions, ensuring enterprise customers have a choice when designing next-generation, disaggregated IT infrastructure.

OpenFlex F3100, the Fastest NVMe-oF Open Composable Storage Platform
As a key NVMe-oF foundational building block of CDI, Western Digital's OpenFlex platform provides the storage tools and resources for organizations taking a truly disaggregated approach to their software-defined storage (SDS) infrastructure. By disaggregating compute, storage and network into virtual resource pools, IT managers can easily provision those resources on the fly, enabling better asset utilization and simplified operations. For example, when compared to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the OpenFlex platform can eliminate underutilized resources and reduce TCO by up to 40 percent¹.

Western Digital's OpenFlex family includes:

• OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric Device: A shared storage device providing up to 2.1 million IOPS, 11.7 GBps throughput, and latencies less than 48 microseconds in a single NVMe-oF device. Each fabric device is available in capacities of up to 61TB, delivering extreme performance over two 50 gigabit Ethernet ports.

• OpenFlex E3000 Series Fabric Enclosure: A 3U enclosure that houses up to 10 hot-swappable F3100 fabric devices. The combination of the OpenFlex E3000 fabric enclosure with up to 10 OpenFlex F3100 fabric devices leads the industry in performance density for open composable platforms projecting up to 7.2M IOPS per rack unit (RU) and 39 GBps/RU with a raw capacity density of 205 TB/RU.

• OpenFlex Open Composability API: A RESTful API that builds upon industry standards such as the DMTF Common Information Model, JSON, and HTTP as well as best practices from other industry-captive management protocols. It provides a framework to help orchestrate fabric-attached devices, including compute, flash, disk, network, accelerators and disaggregated memory into composed systems.

"As a leading brain and spine research institute, our goal is to help prevent, cure, repair and relieve nervous system diseases and injuries, globally. With that, we are constantly adopting the latest generation of IT infrastructure and technologies to help us keep pace with the demands of medical science research and discovery – all driven by data," said Caroline Vidal, CTO and Ludovic Prévost, IT architect at ICM. "Brought to us by our partner 2CRSi, Western Digital's OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable platform gives us the flexibility, in a truly disaggregated environment, to allocate sharable, high-performance flash storage to different groups, labs and research teams when and where it is needed. This is a game-changer for us, allowing us to adapt more quickly to changing workloads and projects, and provision resources more purposefully and efficiently."

"Western Digital is a valued partner of ours as we're constantly looking for innovative storage solutions that uniquely suit our customers' changing needs," said Alain Wilmouth, CEO at 2CRSi. "2CRSi is excited to have engaged the ICM institute with Western Digital on this initiative. In an effort to keep pace with changing applications and IT demands, their OpenFlex NVMe-oF platform takes open composable infrastructure to the next level. We envision many other use cases leveraging this solution. It gives our customers the ability to adapt high-performance shared storage to a variety of workloads in a dynamic and real-time way."

Industry's first Open Composable Compliance Lab
Western Digital is leading the charge in open CDI compatibility testing with a goal to provide customers with proven, interoperable solutions that can effectively adapt to a variety of applications and complex data workloads, without locking customers into proprietary vendor solutions. This flexibility necessitated the creation of the industry's first Open Composable Compliance Lab. Designed in partnership with industry leaders like Broadcom and Mellanox, and with support from numerous key ecosystem players such as DriveScale, Kaminario, Xilinx and more, the lab extends Western Digital's commitment to an open standards-based approach to help accelerate market adoption. This collaboration not only benefits the ecosystem community, but customers have more choice to transform their data centers into highly scalable and flexible environments.

"Western Digital is at the forefront of NVMe-oF storage for CDI," said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital's Data Center Systems business unit. "With the launch of our Open Composable Compliance Lab, we're bringing our commitment to open standards and rigorous compatibility testing to the industry. It is clear we're taking open CDI seriously and are applying best practices, not only with our OpenFlex platform, but throughout the ecosystem to ensure customers have proven, tested solutions they can buy with confidence."

At the 2019 Flash Memory Summit (booth #207), Western Digital will be showcasing its OpenFlex F3100 Fabric Device and E3000 Fabric Enclosure orchestrated by its open API, which has been contributed to OpenCompute.org for review. The company will also show two computational storage workloads in a dynamic open composable ecosystem with Xilinx and Eideticom. Attendees are encouraged to come by the booth or attend one of Western Digital's dozens of sessions and panel discussions at the show.

In addition to the OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable infrastructure platform, Western Digital's full data center portfolio includes: IntelliFlash™ family of hybrid flash and NVMe™ all-flash arrays; ActiveScale™ cloud-scale object storage system; Ultrastar® storage servers and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs.

Stay connected to Western Digital:
Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog, Facebook, YouTube

Resources:
Blog: The Next Step in the Evolution of Composability

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. Western Digital 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

©2019 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, SanDisk, WD, ActiveScale, IntelliFlash, 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. 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 statements regarding the capabilities, features and performance of the company's data technologies, platforms and systems. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: 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, including our most recently filed periodic report to which your attention is directed. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances change after the date of this release.