Western Digital Expands NVMe Range For Accessibility, Higher Density

Western Digital said on Tuesday it is expanding its IntelliFlash line of data centre storage systems with less costly, higher-performing and higher-density NVM Express (NVMe) products, as well as new software with features including live data migration and hybrid-cloud mobility.

The company said its new IntelliFlash N5100 would provide an entry-level NVMe offering for customers looking for an affordable way of accelerating business applications using the non-volatile memory technology.

The unit offers 400,000 IOPS and latency as low as 200µsec and can be mixed and matched with the existing N5200 and N5800 units the IntelliFlash OS 3.10 software.

The IntelliFlash OS 3.10 update doubles the performance of existing hardware, with twice the IOPS, 1.5x the throughput and a latency reduction.

Density doubled

WIth the N5800, for instance, the software delivers 1.7M IOPS and latency as low as 200µsec, Western Digital said.

The company said it attained the performance enhancements by taking better advantage of NVMe’s multi-pathing and multi-tasking capabilities.

Western Digital has introduced increased density with the IntelliFlash HD2160, which offers double the density of the HD range through support for 15TB Ultrastar SSDs.

The new unit offers a maximum raw capacity of 2,576 TB in a 14-rack unit, which could be of interest as companies collect more and more data, whilst dealing with data centre space constraints.

The new IntelliFlash OS 3.10 software brings in features such as Live Dataset Migration, allowing customers to move legacy IntelliFlash data pools or storage pools to new IntelliFlash arrays or carry out on-premise or hybrid cloud migrations without reconfiguration or application recoding.

Software update

Other new features include an Amazon S3 cloud connector for linking to Amazon Web Services or to other S3-enabled platforms such as  Western Digital’s own ActiveScale object storage system.

The software allows customers to place snapshots in AWS for hybrid-cloud configurations to protect data offsite and streamline the process of moving cold or archived data off of primary storage.

Other new features include SMB3 optimisation for Windows File Server 2016 deployments on Hyper-V, simplified VMware deployments and management of VMware vSphere datastores, new administrative features such as a Powershell Toolkit for automating Windows storage, and the IntelliCare predictive-analytics health monitoring service.

“IntelliFlash OS 3.10 is a powerful platform, making it easier with the best economics for customers to upgrade legacy storage infrastructure to NVMe,” said Phil Bullinger, senior vice president and general manager of Western Digital’s data centre systems business unit.