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

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced two new additions to its broad portfolio of NVMe-based systems, platforms, SSDs, and memory drives for data center and cloud customers. With a full portfolio covering applications from edge-to-core, these additions are the Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN630 NVMe SSD and the Western Digital CL SN720 NVMe SSD. Each leverages the power of Western Digital'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 insatiable need for performance, scalability, endurance and low total cost of ownership (TCO) for public and private cloud deployments, hyperscale cloud environments, and next-generation workloads at the edge.

Join the Livestream: Western Digital will be streaming live from Storage Field Day #18 on February 28 at 9 am Pacific. Please join us as we share the innovations, science and technology behind our data center portfolio of HDDs, SSDs, systems and platforms, and hear how we're leading the next revolution in storage with NVMe.

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 quickly becoming the de facto 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, vice president, data center and client computing devices at 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, vice president Products, Storage and Availability at VMware. "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."

Western Digital 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 IOPS for mixed workloads compared with legacy SATA drives. The Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD enables cloud architects to increase performance for latency-sensitive workloads while providing excellent QoS. Recognizing the need for purpose-built storage with varying endurance requirements, the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD will be available in two configurations. For mixed-use workloads, the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD comes in capacities between 800 gigabytes (GB) and 6.4 terabytes (TB) 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 ideally suited to accelerate applications, including software-defined or hyper-converged infrastructures, OLAP, media streaming, and the rapidly growing IoT segment where low latency is paramount.

Western Digital CL SN720 NVMe SSD is an NVMe SSD purpose-built for the performance requirements of boot and edge applications. It enables outstanding random read IOPS performance, optimal 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, the Western Digital CL SN720 NVMe SSD is designed for edge servers, content delivery networks, cloud-based gaming, and IoT platforms and gateways.

Availability
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 April.

The new NVMe SSDs complement Western Digital's full 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-class HDDs and SSDs.

Related Western Digital blogs:
Reshaping the Cloud and Edge with NVMe™ Innovations
How NVMe enables Data to Thrive (video)
What is NVMe and Why is it Important? A Technical Guide
Making Data Thrive with NVMe
Why NVME is Key to SQL Server 2008 Migration

Western Digital is unifying its branding. Over the coming months, customers will see some commercial and enterprise Tegile™, HGST™, SanDisk® and WD® products transition to Western Digital® branding. Branding unification for certain products will provide customers with more brand clarity, portfolio flexibility, and simplification of choice. Visit the company's new website at WesternDigital.com for more information.

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About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. 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 marketed under the Western Digital, G-Technology™, SanDisk, Upthere™ and WD brands.

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

Forward-Looking Statements
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the applications, benefits, capabilities, features and performance of Western Digital's SSD products. 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.

© 2019 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, HGST, SanDisk, Tegile, Upthere, WD, 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 word mark is a trademark of NVM Express, Inc. VMware and VMware vSAN are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.