Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that its popular HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe solid state drive (SSD) is now certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere. Optimized for easy set-up, the Ultrastar SN150 SSD for VMWare environments reduces latency, and brings hyperscale-level performance and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) time to virtualized servers and cloud storage. This can significantly lower the total cost of ownership of VMware storage environments over traditional storage architectures by reducing performance tuning and field support costs. In server-side environments where VMware virtualization management is utilized, the Ultrastar SN150 is an ideal option for data center managers building or deploying systems on VMware Virtual SAN or vSphere.

Part of Western Digital's HGST-branded Ultrastar data center storage solutions family, the certified Ultrastar SN150 is available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor and is one of the first NVMe SSDs in the industry to utilize VMware's in-box NVMe driver. For data center administrators, this helps eliminate the hassle of time-consuming downloads and configurations, and allows faster deployment. The Ultrastar SN150 drive is available in capacities ranging from 1120GB1 to 3820GB and offers speeds which exceed Virtual SAN's highest performance class (Class F) specifications, enabling it to easily address the heaviest data workloads in a variety of virtualized server and storage configurations, including all-flash and hybrid configurations utilizing flash for caching and hard disk drives for storage capacity."Our Ultrastar SN150 PCIe drive is one of the most effective ways for data centers to extend their virtualization IT infrastructure, offering consistently high performance, with very low latency and the speed of NVMe," said Anand Jayapalan, vice president of enterprise and client compute solutions marketing at Western Digital. "With its certification, we further broaden Western Digital's unmatched portfolio of VMware-certified storage solutions for IT administrators managing the growing data needs of their most demanding cloud, hyperscale and enterprise applications in all-flash and hybrid Virtual SAN environments."

"Customers racing to meet dynamic business demands look for strong business partners to simplify the adoption of new technologies," said Lee Caswell, vice president of products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware. "We have partnered with Western Digital to integrate the price-performance benefits of the Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD with the leading hyperconverged product, VMware Virtual SAN. Our low-risk inbox certified driver approach delights customers and reduces risk for partners."

Compared to commonly used Virtual SAN certified SAS products, the NVMe-based Ultrastar SN150 drive can deliver up to nearly four times the IOPS performance for 4K random reads and nearly twice the IOPS performance for 4K random writes2. Coupled with its low latency (~20 microseconds), Ultrastar SN150 SSDs are designed to give consistent, predicable performance. They are well-suited for latency-sensitive On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) database workloads, fast Virtual Desktops, and mixed workloads environments running databases and latency-sensitive applications where response time is critical, such as e-Commerce, financial applications and in-house applications such as e-mail.

The Ultrastar SN150 drive is the latest addition to company's full portfolio of storage solutions for VMware environments. Western Digital Corporation and its family of WD, HGST and SanDisk brands today offers more than 200 different storage devices, software solutions and configurations certified for vSphere and Virtual SAN including Fusion ioMemory PCIe SSDs, SanDisk Lightning II SAS SSDs, Ultrastar 7K6000 enterprise HDD, FlashSoft 4 for vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, and many others. Western Digital storage products are utilized in all of the top 10 VMmark benchmarks for vSphere, including the latest #1 benchmark published this month.

Features and Specifications

• Certified for use on VMware vSphere and Virtual SAN platforms
• Enterprise-grade reliability: Flash-aware RAID, end-to-end data-path protection, advanced ECC, secure erase, power fail protection
• Supports the PCIe Gen 3.0 server platforms
• Classified at the highest performance category (Class F) for Virtual SAN
• Available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor

For more information, visit the product page.