Western Digital OpenFlex Data24 Announced

Today, Western Digital (WD) announced plans to begin shipping its Western Digital OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) Storage Platform in the fall. WD’s OpenFlex Data24 device will ship with 24 NVMe SSDs inside.  We covered WD’s OpenFlex architecture when they announced it two years ago.  Western Digital was founded 50 years ago as General Digital. Since then, it has become a household name, providing storage systems for everything from home use to the data center.

Today, Western Digital (WD) announced plans to begin shipping an OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) Storage Platform in the fall. WD’s OpenFlex Data24 device will ship with 24 NVMe SSDs inside.  We covered WD’s OpenFlex architecture when they announced it two years ago.  Western Digital was founded 50 years ago as General Digital. Since then, it has become a household name, providing storage systems for everything from home use to the data center.

Western Digital’s OpenFlex Data24 will be a huge leap forward from both their own current devices and other products on the market. With support for twenty-four NVMe SSDs, OpenFlex Data24 more than doubles the ten drives WD’s OpenFlex F3100 devices could support. It’s also significantly slimmer. The F3100 is a 3U form factor with a height of 5.16”, but the OpenFlex Data24 will come in a 2U form factor.  Western Digital says that it plans to launch the device with 24 hot-swappable Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs, providing a shared storage capacity of up to 368TB.

The device’s RapidFlex RDMA-enabled NVMe-oF controllers will allow up to six hosts to be directly attached with 100Gb Ethernet without the need for an external switch. According to the company, RapidFlex controllers provide sub-500 nanosecond latency for projected platform performance topping 13M IOPS/70GB/s when adding all six network adapters to the OpenFlex Data24. Despite the major upgrade it represents over the F3100, WD says that their new device will be fully interoperable with the OpenFlex F-series.

If you didn’t recognize the name of the SSDs the OpenFlex Data24 ships with, that’s because they don’t exist quite yet either. Western Digital says it plans to begin shipping the first Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSDs next month. The new drives will, of course, ship with Western Digital’s in-house NVMe controller and firmware. The drives use 96-layer TLC NAND architecture to pack up to 15.36TB in a drop-in U.2 15mm form factor.  Random read/write IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) reaches speeds of 780K/250K, respectively. The drives ship with power-loss protection and TCG encryption built-in.

Availability

OpenFlex Data24 is targeted for Fall 2020

Ultrastar DC SN840 NVMe SSD is targeted for next month, July 2020

Western Digital OpenFlex Devices

Western Digital Ultrastar NVMe Drives

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