Modular Building Block for Open, Composable IT Infrastructure

With the exponential growth in data, along with the increasing diversity of workflows and demands on IT infrastructure, businesses need to increase speed, agility, and time-to-value for their customers. Emerging as a solution for this, composable infrastructure is a new architectural approach that-using NVMe™-over-Fabrics-will vastly improve compute and storage utilization, performance, and agility in the data center.

Enabling Fast Data to Live Outside the Server

NVMe-over-Fabrics, or NVMe-oF™, is a networked storage protocol that allows storage to be disaggregated from compute to make that storage widely available to multiple applications and servers. By enabling applications to share a common pool of storage capacity data can be easily shared between applications or needed capacity can be allocated to an application regardless of location.

Exploiting NVMe device-level performance, NVMe-oF promises to deliver the lowest end-to-end latency from application to shared storage. NVMe-oF enables composable infrastructures to deliver the data locality benefits of NVMe DAS (low latency, high performance) while providing the agility and flexibility of sharing storage and compute.

Multiple Storage Tiers over the Same Wire-Disk and Flash Accessed via NVMe-oF

In addition to enabling NAND flash media access using NVMe-oF, Western Digital has also enabled disks to be accessed via NVMe-oF so that all data center storage can be addressed in the same way. The Western Digital NVMe-oF architecture is a huge step towards the software-defined data center-allowing storage to be assigned to applications without regard for where it is physically located. This is the essence of "composable infrastructure" where physical resources (compute, networking, storage) can be logically and dynamically configured and treated as a resource for a specific application without the need for physical configuration.

Western Digital will initially offer two composable storage options-flash for high-performance, mission-critical apps, and data as well as disk for high-capacity tiering, data protection, and disaster recovery.