Western Digital expands flash portfolio for scaling data-centric architectures in the Zettabyte era

Building on a unique and diverse product portfolio across HDD and flash, Western Digital announced a suite of new NVMe SSDs for enabling next-generation, data-centric architectures for data centers, industrial IoT, automotive and client applications. The new family includes the Ultrastar® DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe™ SSD for designing a more efficient data center storage tier with competitive TCO; the Western Digital® IX SN530 Industrial SSD for the extreme environments of industrial and automotive applications; and the 2TB WD Blue™ SN550 NVMe SSD for speeding up PC performance. Leveraging Western Digital’s unique vertical integration capabilities – from designing and manufacturing its NAND flash to developing its own in-house SSD controllers and firmware – the new products underscore the company’s continued strength and commitment in driving storage innovation for new system architectures, applications and use cases for global customers across cloud, OEM, enterprise, channel and retail end-user markets.

Enabling Efficient Data Center Architectures – The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years, according to IDC. Billions of connected systems will generate a myriad of contextualized data sets from smart video to consumer and sensor data, which must be captured, transformed and analyzed to bring value to industries, businesses and people. Legacy architectures cannot keep up with data-intensive environments. The challenge is how to efficiently and cost-effectively build the data infrastructure that will keep up with data demands of the zettabyte-scale era. Storage is critical and fundamental to creating these new architectures and extracting value from data.

Zoned Storage is the new storage architecture for the next-generation enterprise data center. In addition to championing the Zoned Storage Initiative and ZoneStorage.io, and contributing to the NVMe Working team ZNS specification and the Linux® open-source community to further ecosystem development, Western Digital announced that it is now sampling the new Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS NVMe SSD to select customers. The Ultrastar DC ZN540 ZNS SSD includes a vertically integrated, dual-port, high-availability NVMe controller with capacities up to 8TB in a standard U.2 form-factor. Leveraging ZNS, an industry standard specification, the new DC ZN540 is a new generation of SSD ideally suited for multi-tenancy environments and other data-centric applications such as event stream processing. Compared to conventional SSDs, the drive delivers up to 4x performance and 2.5x QoS improvements, as well as better efficiency, utilization, and scale while lowering TCO for public and private cloud infrastructure. Western Digital is committed to the development of a comprehensive Zoned Storage ecosystem and application support, which includes managing the synergies of high-capacity SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs under a standardized unified Zoned Storage framework.

Empowering Data-Intensive Industrial IoT and Automotive Designs – Western Digital’s new IX SN530 is an industrial-grade NVMe SSD designed for the extreme temperature, performance, high-endurance and reliability requirements found in automotive and industrial applications. Ideal for factory automation, transportation, medical, robotics, drones, defense, retail and other rugged edge environments, the IX SN530 NVMe SSD features a broad operating temperature range from -40°C to +85°C, and delivers a 20G operating vibration specification. With read performance of up to 2,400 MB/s, it is the high-performance solution for OEMs designing new applications or transitioning from SATA SSDs. It is available in compact M.2 2230 or M.2 2280 form factors with capacity points from 85GB to 2TB. The IX SN530 TLC family is now sampling. SLC versions will be available in January 2021.

Bringing 2TB Capacity and Speed to Content Creators – The award-winning WD Blue portfolio now offers its popular WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD in a 2TB drive, bringing a higher-capacity NVMe solution to content creators, including graphic designers, animators, videographers, architects and software developers. Whether creating digital art, using CAD software or in post-production, the WD Blue SN550 NVMe SSD delivers over four times the speed of Western Digital’s fastest SATA drives. The WD Blue SN550 2TB is available now for purchase at select Western Digital retailers, e-tailers, resellers, system integrators and at the WD store for $249.99 MSRP.

“Companies across every major industry and every vertical market are using flash technology to transform their businesses. The future of storage is application centric, and optimized for those businesses.” said Robert Soderbery, executive vice president and general manager, Western Digital’s Flash business. “We are launching new SSD products for cloud, enterprise storage, industrial and client computing applications. These new SSDs are critical building blocks for our digital world, enabled by new architectures, giving a variety of customers more options than ever to ensure their data is fast, secure and protected.”