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Western Digital used its annual Investor Day Dec. 6 to announce the unveiling of its fastest-ever all-flash storage platform, one that it claims can perform 18 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) of data movement.
To put this into some sort of perspective, 2 million IOPS is a pretty fast machine.
The Irvine, Calif.-based company is using this new system to lure more high-performance clients — such as scientific, financial services, military, government and media enterprises — to its product lines.
The platform is designed to provide the high availability and serviceability required to support the highest-value business applications. The advanced platform is designed for real-time and streaming analytics applications, such as credit card fraud detection, video stream analysis, location-based services, advertising servers and automated systems.
It’s also aimed at solutions built on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or deep learning (DL).
The as-yet-unnamed high-performance NVMe (non-volative memory)-over-PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) fabric advanced flash platform will be available in the first half of calendar 2017, WD said. It is being tested now.
To promote standardization, the company said it plans to contribute software in support of this technology to the open source community. A schedule for that rollout isn’t yet available.
The new rack-mounted storage server is compact, fitting into the current trend of converged infrastructure devices. Using only two units (2U or 3.75-inch) of rack space, this represents the highest performance per rack unit in the industry, WD said.
WD said this high performance is achieved through industry-standard NVMe solid-state disks connected to multiple servers over a PCIe-switched fabric. The low latencies of these devices and the PCIe interconnect combine to deliver a winning combination of high performance and compact form factor, WD said.
In addition to raw performance, the technology provides independent provisioning of capacity and performance, which is essential to the sharing of storage resources in a disaggregated cloud data center architecture, the company said.