Western Digital announced a comprehensive suite of open standards, architectures, and products to meet the growing demands of large public and private cloud data centers.
What is WD OpenFlex architecture?
With the introduction of a new product line and the OpenFlex architecture, the company announced that it would provide the community with a programming interface (API) and specifications for key products to provide a solid foundation for the open software composite infrastructure (SCI).
SCI enables a new level of scalability, efficiency, agility, and performance by providing solutions that enable independent scaling of computing, storage and network resources that can be quickly orchestrated.
Software composite infrastructure (SCI) features
Elements of today’s announcement include Open Kingfish API for orchestration and management of SCIs; Open mechanical product specifications for vendor-neutral solutions; OpenFlex architecture and ecosystem for early partners; OpenFlex product line of flash devices and NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMf) disks.
The exponential growth of data not only drives the development of new big data and fast data applications but also creates complexity in the way data is captured, preserved, used and transformed. Because large amounts of data are distributed across multiple applications over a longer lifecycle, the dynamics of these most demanding high-level workloads exceed the limits of traditional data infrastructure.
The advantage of NVMf technology
Based on industry-standard NVMf technology, Western Digital’s OpenFlex architecture creates the independently scalable disk and flash arrays that can be connected to computer resources via common network technologies such as Ethernet. The Kingfish API enables the representation of disk and flash groups as a software infrastructure of software that can be quickly and easily orchestrated on logical application servers.
How Hyper-Conversive Infrastructure (HCI) Works?
Compared to a Hyper-Conversive Infrastructure (HCI) with fixed computing, storage, and networking relationships, OpenFlex products and architectures can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 40 percent by eliminating underutilized resources. The fine scalability of OpenFlex can also reduce initial infrastructure investments by almost 50 percent. Because distributed resources are directly interconnected, application performance can be more predictable because logical servers are less susceptible to noisy and annoying workloads competing for the same resources or data paths.
“Data centers need a more efficient approach to meet the needs of complex and dynamic data applications and workflows,” said Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Systems, Western Digital. “To ensure flexibility, data center operators also need open solutions to choose from the best selection of vendors. Western Digital’s OpenFlex products and architectures and our commitment to the open community help meet these requirements while significantly improving cost and agility. We are continuing to build on our proven leadership in hard disk, flash and NVMe storage products to secure the future of the data infrastructure.
High Cloud Storage Demands
“To keep pace with the workload of rapidly changing applications, data center managers must try to build flexible infrastructures with the core elements. Usually storage and computing are added to increase performance and capacity, but in the end, they are abused, resulting in unnecessarily high costs,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Group VP, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies at IDC. “Western Digital’s OpenFlex architecture offers composite flexibility that maximizes the use and utilization of resources in a highly scalable and flexible manner and eliminates “abandoned storage” problems. It also removes the lockdown barrier facing the real estate infrastructure and paves the way for greater ecosystem participation.
At the time of this announcement, the OpenFlex architecture is already driving a huge ecosystem of hardware and software offerings for data centers, including: Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Apache Mesos, Broadcom, Ceph, DriveScale, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Inspur, Kaminario, Kubernetes, Marvell, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft SQL Server, Percona and Super Micro Computer.
OpenFlex F3000 Series Scalability
Western Digital’s OpenFlex family of products will be available in various levels and features to help data center architects and IT managers create a scalable and flexible data center to meet their unique needs. Among the most important are:
– OpenFlex F3000 Series Appliance: For fast data applications requiring high performance. Available in capacities up to 61 TB4, it offers low latency NVMe flash performance on 2 50 GB5 Ethernet ports.
– E3000 Series OpenFlex Enclosures: A 3U enclosure for up to 10 interchangeable F3000 devices.
– OpenFlex D3000 Series Appliance: For large volume applications requiring high capacity.
The 1U device offers a hard disk capacity of up to 168TB at 2 25Gb Ethernet ports. The OpenFlex F3000 appliance and OpenFlex E3000 package will be available in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2018. The OpenFlex D3000 device will be available from 2019.