Western Digital Expands Flash Portfolio for Scaling Data-Centric Architectures in the Zettabyte Era

Building on a unique and diverse product portfolio across HDD and flash, Western Digital  announced a suite of new NVMe™ SSDs for enabling next-generation, data-centric architectures for data centers, industrial IoT, automotive and client applications. The new family includes the Ultrastar^® DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD for designing a more efficient data center storage tier with competitive TCO; and the Western Digital^® IX SN530 Industrial SSD for the extreme environments of industrial and automotive applications. Leveraging Western Digital’s unique vertical integration capabilities – from designing and manufacturing its NAND flash to developing its own in-house SSD controllers and firmware – the new products underscore the company’s continued strength and commitment in driving storage innovation for new system architectures, applications and use cases for global customers across cloud, OEM, enterprise, channel and retail end-user markets.

“A new, data-centric architecture is the need of the hour to meet the explosive growth of data and address the growing complexity of workloads. Working in parallel with our customers and partner ecosystem gives us unique insights that help us create solutions to address the increasing need for data-centric solutions,” said Khalid Wani, director of Sales, India, Western Digital. “We’re thrilled to share the news of the introduction of our new range of NVMe SSDs that are designed to meet the data demands of the zettabyte-scale era and provide robust storage for data center architects, content creators and developers.”

Jaganathan Chelliah, director of Marketing, India, Western Digital, said, “Today, enterprises are moving toward digital transformation, where big data and fast data are significantly leveraged to enhance business productivity and provide better customer experience.  We have a role in offering data infrastructure to cater to these increasing requirements. At Western Digital, we are always pushing to fuel innovation and introduce future-facing technologies and solutions driving tomorrow’s data-centric infrastructure. This new set of NVMe-based SSDs offer extreme performance and competitive TCOs for our customers.”

Enabling Efficient Data Center Architectures – The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years, according to IDC. Billions of connected systems will generate a myriad of contextualized data sets from smart video to consumer and sensor data, which must be captured, transformed and analyzed to bring value to industries, businesses and people. Legacy architectures cannot keep up with today’s data-intensive environments. The challenge is how to efficiently and cost-effectively build the data infrastructure that will keep up with data demands of the zettabyte-scale era. Storage is critical and fundamental to creating these new architectures and extracting value from data.

Zoned Storage is the new storage architecture for the next-generation enterprise data center. In addition to championing the Zoned Storage Initiative and ZoneStorage.io, and contributing to the NVMe Working Group ZNS specification and the Linux^® open-source community to further ecosystem development, Western Digital today announced that it is now sampling the new Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD to select customers. The Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS SSD includes a vertically integrated, dual-port, high-availability NVMe controller with capacities up to 8TB in a standard U.2 form-factor. Leveraging ZNS, an industry standard specification, the new DC ZN540 is a new generation of SSD ideally suited for multi-tenancy environments and other data-centric applications such as event stream processing. Compared to conventional SSDs, the drive delivers up to 4x performance and 2.5x QoS improvements, as well as better efficiency, utilization, and scale while lowering TCO for public and private cloud infrastructure. Western Digital is committed to the development of a comprehensive Zoned Storage ecosystem and application support, which includes managing the synergies of high-capacity SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs under a standardized unified Zoned Storage framework.

Empowering Data-Intensive Industrial IoT and Automotive Designs – Western Digital’s new IX SN530 is an industrial-grade NVMe SSD designed for the extreme temperature, performance, high-endurance and reliability requirements found in automotive and industrial applications. Ideal for factory automation, transportation, medical, robotics, drones, defense, retail and other rugged edge environments, the IX SN530 NVMe SSD features a broad operating temperature range from -40°C to +85°C and delivers a 20G operating vibration specification. With read performance of up to 2,400 MB/s, it is the high-performance solution for OEMs designing new applications or transitioning from SATA SSDs. It is available in compact M.2 2230 or M.2 2280 form factors with capacity points from 85GB to 2TB. The IX SN530 TLC family is now sampling. SLC versions will be available in January 2021.