Today at FMS 2019, Western Digital announced new innovations and initiatives to drive support and adoption of open, composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). To this end, the company announced its new 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. Western Digital will be showcasing its OpenFlex NVMe-oF architecture, an open API and open composable flash platform that the company claims is the fastest available in the F3100.
Today at FMS 2019, Western Digital announced new innovations and initiatives to drive support and adoption of open, composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). To this end, the company announced its new 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. Western Digital will be showcasing its OpenFlex NVMe-oF architecture, an open API and open composable flash platform that the company claims is the fastest available in the F3100.
As far as OpenFlex goes, Western Digital states that it is a platform that provides the storage tools and resources for organizations taking a truly disaggregated approach to their software-defined storage (SDS) infrastructure. CDI works by disaggregating compute, storage and network into virtual resource pools. This means users can provision the resources they need when they need them. This process should lead to better asset utilization and simplification that translates to a reduction in TCO, up to 40% according to the company.
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 part of Western Digital’s effort to support the adoption of CDI the company launched the first Open Composable Compliance Lab. The Lab’s man focus in on open CDI compatibility testing with the goal of providing customers with proven, interoperable solutions that can effectively adapt to a variety of applications and complex data workloads. The Lab was designed in partnership with Broadcom and Mellanox and has support from various others in the ecosystem including DriveScale, Kaminario, Xilinx and more.
Western Digital will be showcasing OpenFlex F3100 as well as other technology at booth #207 during FMS 2019.
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