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Western Digital Selected as a Finalist for Storage Magazine’s 2019 Product of the Year Awards
February 12, 2020 By BlueAlly
OpenFlex™ F3100 Series Fabric Device Designated “Most Composable,” Lone NVMe-oF™ Product Recognized in the Hyperconverged and Composable Infrastructures Category
SAN JOSE, CA - Feb 12, 2020
Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) has been selected as a finalist for Storage Magazine's prestigious Products of the Year Awards for 2019. TechTarget and SearchStorage editors recognized the OpenFlex F3100 Series Fabric Device as "the most composable entrant in the finalist lineup" for the Hyperconverged and Composable Infrastructures category.
Now in its 18th year, the enterprise data storage Products of the Year Awards compare the best technology hardware, software and services offerings available across five categories. TechTarget's expert panel of analysts, consultants and end users judged this year's entrants based on technological innovation, performance, ease of integration into enterprise IT environments, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value.
Products that qualified for the Hyperconverged and Composable Infrastructures category included solutions that combine storage, compute and virtualization resources for management as a single system through a common tool set. Composable systems and software that use a unifying API to disaggregate and manage shared pools of physical resources also qualified. As described by judges, "OpenFlex's disaggregated architecture embraces open source to scale across public and private clouds. Impressive performance and density in a 3U all-flash array, the system is the only NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) finalist in this category. Disaggregating storage from servers by using NVMe-oF will improve storage utilization and performance balancing."
The OpenFlex platform provides a new architectural approach to software-defined storage (SDS) infrastructure, enabling storage, networking, and compute to be disaggregated into shareable resource pools. Combined with an open standards-based, scalable and easy-to-use Open Composability API, OpenFlex helps IT managers better provision on the fly with simplified operations, eliminate underutilized resources and reduce TCO by up to 40 percent¹ when compared to hyperconverged infrastructure. The OpenFlex F3100 NVMe-oF storage device provides blazing-fast speeds up to 2.1 million IOPS, 11.7 GBps throughput, and latencies less than 48 microseconds. Each fabric-attached device is available in capacities of up to 61TB2, delivering extreme performance over two 50 gigabit Ethernet ports.
"Western Digital is fully committed to driving ecosystem-wide support and adoption of open composable infrastructure, and OpenFlex is the NVMe-oF foundational building block to help enterprises optimize their data storage environments," said Kurt Chan, vice president, Data Center Platforms Business Unit at Western Digital. "It's a great honor to have OpenFlex among the products listed for this esteemed award as it further validates our innovation and efforts to enable open, next-generation IT infrastructures."
Western Digital's data center solutions address a variety of needs in a fast-moving and ever-changing data technology landscape. Its broad data center portfolio includes its family of Ultrastar HDDs and SSDs; WD Gold HDDs; OpenFlex™ NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar JBOF/JBOD storage platforms; Kazan NVMe-oF bridge solutions; and the Ultrastar memory extension drive.