Modular Building Block for Open, Composable Disaggregated 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.OpenFlex is based on scale-out performance and open composability.

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 to respond to application needs.

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 direct attached storage (low latency, high performance) while providing the agility and flexibility of sharing storage and compute. OpenFlex's scale-out performance is particularly useful for large analytics tasks, large-scale high performance computing and other demanding workloads.

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, OpenFlex also enables disk and other IT components such as GPUs, FPGAs and even tape 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 has established the Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL). The OCCL is where different vendors can come together to test and verify their Open architecture. The OCCL underscores Western Digital's commitment to having a dynamic community of technologies supporting composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI), which is an important step in providing the flexibility needed to keep up with the rapid rate of change in today's business environment.