Western Digital today expanded its data center SSD and HDD portfolio with the introduction of the HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 NVMe-compatible PCIe solid-state drive series, the 12TB Ultrastar He12 drive, while it also announced plans to extend the He12 platform to 14TB, leveraging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).

The Ultrastar SN200 NVMe SSD Series is the highest capacity NVMe PCIe SSD available today in 2.5-inch and Half-Height, Half-Length (HH-HL) form factors. Leveraging Western Digital's memory technology, it is the company's fastest NVMe PCIe SSD to date, offering up to 100 percent more sequential read, and up to 61 percent more random read performance than the company's previous-generation NVMe-compliant SSD, the HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 SSD. Available in capacities ranging from 800GB to 7.68TB, the new NVMe PCIe SSD has been designed for workload-intensive cloud and hyperscale environments that demand instant response times.

The Ultrastar SS200 SSD is the highest capacity and highest performing SAS SSD from the company to date. It is built to efficiently deliver capacity, low-latency performance and the endurance needed in data center environments. Offered in capacities up to 7.68TB, it brings new capabilities and possibilities to storage arrays, hyperconverged and software-defined architectures that require dual-port design with a SAS interface.

The enterprise class Ultrastar SS200 SSD is available in two endurance classes, including 1 and 3 random drive writes per day (DWPD). Leveraging advanced NAND management technology, the SSD offers very high read performance (up to 1,800MB/s sequential/up to 250,0000 4KiB IOPS random) without compromising on write performance (up to 1,000 MB/s sequential/up to 86,000 4KiB IOPS random).

In addition, the Ultrastar SS200, leverages the company's latest generation Guardian Technology platform, a proprietary set of features and technologies that improve endurance and reliability.

The He12 is Western Digital's fourth-generation helium HDD, featuring an eight-disk design, to deliver 12TB capacity using PMR technology in a standard 3.5-inch form factor. It is the world?s highest capacity hard disk drive for active random workloads. Utilizing Western Digital's HelioSeal process that seals helium in the drive to help provide the high capacity HDD and power efficiency, the He12 comes in a single 12TB capacity point and offers either a SATA or SAS interface both using Advanced Format. HelioSeal technology utilizes helium with 1/7 the density of air, enabling the use of thinner disks, while maintaining a stable recording interface. The He12 design adds an eighth disk, two more than the highest capacity air-based drive, which enabled the capacity increase to 12TB, 50 percent more than the highest air-based design. It also encompasses a low-power design without compromising performance.

The company will extend the He12 platform further, leveraging SMR to provide even more capacity from the same essential hardware. The SMR version of the drive will deliver 14TB and will support, in particular, many cloud service providers that have implemented SMR support in their software architectures to more cost effectively store ever increasing data associated with the services they provide.

WD is currently sampling the Ultrastar SN200 NVMe SSD Series and the Ultrastar SS200 SAS SSD and will be generally available in the first quarter of the 2017 calendar year. The company is also currently sampling to select OEMs the Ultrastar He12, which will be generally available the first half of the 2017 calendar year, and the 14TB SMR HDD, which will be generally available in the middle of 2017 calendar year.

Advanced Storage Platform Technology For Cloud Scale Applications

Western Digital also today unveiled innovative technology aimed at optimizing storage performance, efficiency and cost in disaggregated cloud-scale data center infrastructures. Targeting the needs of real-time applications, the advanced flash platform provides very high performance that can be provisioned across multiple servers.

The all-flash storage platform delivers 18 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) of performance. Using only 2-units (2U or 3.75-inch) of rack space, this represents the highest performance per rack unit in the industry. This performance is achieved through industry-standard NVMe SSDs connected to multiple servers over a PCIe switched fabric. In addition to raw performance, the technology provides independent provisioning of capacity and performance. The capabilities of this platform are suited for real-time and streaming analytics applications such as credit card fraud detection, video stream analysis, location-based services, advertising servers, automated systems, and solutions built on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or deep learning (DL).

The high-performance NVMe-over-PCIe fabric advanced flash platform will be available in the first half of calendar 2017. The company plans to contribute software in support of this technology to the open source community.