The two new 96-layer 3D flash NVMe SSD families launched by Western Digital, Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340, are purpose-built for either mixed-use-case workloads or very read-intensive applications, respectively.
Empowering new data center workloads, from video and machine-to-machine (M2M) to IoT and analytics, Western Digital’s new Ultrastar NVMe SSDs are helping data center architects design “more efficient, purpose-built” storage tiers.
Western Digital’s new purpose-built NVMe SSD solutions include:
- Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSD Family – for Mixed-Use-Case Workloads
- Ultrastar DC SN340 NVMe SSD Family – for Very Read-Intensive Use Cases
The Ultrastar DC SN640 family is optimized for extreme performance for mixed-workload applications such as SQL Server, MySQL, virtual desktops, and other business-critical workloads using hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) such as VMware vSAN and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions. It would deliver 2x the performance in sequential writes compared to its predecessor.
Supporting a variety of system designs, Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN640 comes in three form factors and offers a broad range of capacity points, including:
- EDSFF E1.L with up to 30.72TB – designed to provide blazing speeds up to 720K random-read IOPS. This game-changing form factor is ideal for designing best petabyte/rack for new dense data-center designs.
- U.2 7mm with up to 7.68TB – a popular form factor for storage servers, virtualized environments, and containerized applications using denser, power-efficient blade systems.
- M.2 22×110 with up to 3.84TB – for constrained spaces and OCP-compliant hardware.
CDN, Video Caching
Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC SN340 Gen3 x4 PCIe SSD is optimized for power efficiency and low heat signature with less than 7W at full performance. It would be ideal for very read-intensive workloads such as warm storage and other applications that write in large block sizes. These include content delivery networks (CDN) and video caching, where data is written in large sequential blocks and which benefit significantly from the high-bandwidth of Gen3 x4 and low read latency of NVMe.
Distributed NoSQL databases like Apache Cassandra and MongoDB can also take advantage of the large-block write characteristics of the drive. The Ultrastar DC SN340 comes in capacities of up to 7.68TB. The drive will be sampling to select customers this quarter.
“Customers are rapidly transitioning to a variety of purpose-built NVMe storage solutions to improve storage performance, efficiency, density and overall TCO,” said Eyal Bek, vice president of product marketing for Enterprise Devices at Western Digital. “It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all world. Our Ultrastar NVMe SSDs are based on our deep understanding of evolving workloads and trends within the data center and are aligned to our proven and reliable 96L NAND nodes. We take pride in knowing that our new Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340 SSDs are optimized to support the purpose-built workloads and data volume demands of today, while laying the foundation for the future of zettabyte scale.”
