Western Digital today announced two new 96-layer 3D flash NVMe SSD families, the Ultrastar DC SN640 and Ultrastar DC SN340. Both are purpose-built for either mixed-use-case workloads or very read-intensive applications, respectively. The new Ultrastar drives help meet the evolving, and increasingly specific workload demands placed on data centers today, while building a strong, flexible foundation for the zettabyte-scale era of the future. Leveraging Western Digital's in-house SSD controller designs, firmware development and vertical integration, these new solutions underscore the company's strengths in developing innovations that allow customers' data to thrive, from edge to core to cloud.

NVMe is having a great impact on enterprises and what they can do with data, particularly for real-time analytics, M2M and IoT, and emerging technologies like composable infrastructure. Data center customers understand the nature of their data streams and application workloads and are realizing that today's general-purpose architectures are inefficient and can carry resource and cost overhead.Ushering in new NVMe SSD innovations for the workload evolution, Western Digital's new purpose-built solutions include:

Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSD Family for Mixed-Use-Case Workloads
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 delivers 2x the performance in sequential writes compared to its predecessor. Supporting a variety of system designs, the new family 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 22x110 with up to 3.84TB for constrained spaces and OCP-compliant hardware.

The Ultrastar DC SN640 is built on a proven architecture where cloud, enterprise, OEM, and channel partners can expect streamlined qualifications, and broad OS and hardware certifications for improving time-to-market designs. The Ultrastar DC SN640 family also delivers flexibility with tunable endurance and multiple security options. Delivering a competitive TCO, the drives lay the foundation to support data centers at zettabyte scale, utilizing NVMe multi-namespace management for designing future-generation architectures. Qualification samples are now available to select customers.

"We are pleased to be partnering with Western Digital to deliver compelling HCI solutions for hybrid-cloud workloads," said Lee Caswell, vice president of VMware HCI Products, VMware. "HCI solutions leveraging the new Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe flash product, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware vSAN introduce compelling TCO and productivity gains for customers looking to modernize their infrastructure."

Ultrastar DC SN340 NVMe SSD Family for Very Read-Intensive Use Cases
The Ultrastar DC SN340 Gen3 x4 PCIe SSD is optimized for power efficiency and low heat signature with less than 7W at full performance. It is 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."

The new NVMe SSDs complement Western Digital's full data center portfolio, including the IntelliFlash hybrid, all-flash and NVMe all-flash storage arrays; ActiveScale cloud-scale object storage system; OpenFlex NVMe-over-fabrics (NVMe-oF ) open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar storage servers and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs.