Hoping to direct the future of data infrastructures, Western Digital launches a comprehensive set of open standards, architecture and products to address the ever-increasing demands of high-scale private and public cloud data centers. In addition to introducing new OpenFlex architecture and products, the company plans to deliver an application programming interface (API) and key product specifications to the open community to create a complete foundation for open, software composable infrastructure (SCI).
Supposedly, by delivering solutions that enable the independent scaling of compute, storage and network resources that can be quickly orchestrated, SCI enables new levels of scalability, efficiency, agility and performance. Offerings include:
- The Kingfish™ open API for orchestrating and managing SCI
- Open product mechanical specifications to enable vendor neutral solutions
- OpenFlex architecture and initial partner ecosystem
- OpenFlex product line of flash and disk NVMe™-over-Fabric (NVMf) devices
Built on NVMf technology, the OpenFlex architecture creates independently scalable pools of flash and disk that can be connected to computing resources via common networking technologies, such as Ethernet. The Kingfish API enables the flash and disk pools to be presented as software composable infrastructure that can be quickly and easily orchestrated into logical application servers. When compared to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCIs), which has fixed ratios of compute, storage and networking, the OpenFlex architecture and products can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 40% by eliminating underutilized resources. The fine-grain scalability of OpenFlex can also reduce initial infrastructure investment by nearly 50 percent2. Additionally, with the disaggregated resources being directly connected, application performance can be more predictable since the logical servers are less susceptible to “noisy neighbor” workloads that compete for the same resources or data paths.
OpenFlex fabric-attached products will be offered in a variety of performance levels and capacities to enable data center architects and IT managers to custom-build a scalable data center. Highlights include:
- OpenFlex F3000 Series Fabric Device: For performance intensive Fast Data applications. Available in capacities up to 61TB4, it delivers low-latency NVMe flash performance over two 50Gb5 Ethernet ports.
- OpenFlex E3000 Series Fabric Enclosure: A 3U enclosure that houses up to ten hot swappable F3000 fabric devices.
- OpenFlex D3000 Series Fabric Device: For capacity intensive Big Data applications. The 1U device offers up to 168TB of hard disk capacity over two 25Gb Ethernet ports.
The OpenFlex F3000 fabric device and OpenFlex E3000 enclosure will be available in the fourth quarter of calendar 2018. The OpenFlex D3000 fabric device will be available in 2019. For more info, visit Western Digital.