Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that two of its most compelling data center devices are now certified for use with VMware® environments¹, including the high-capacity yet cost-effective SanDisk-branded CloudSpeed™ Eco Gen. II SATA solid state drive (SSD) and the HGST-branded Ultrastar® SN100 PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe SSD, which was rated in VMware’s highest performance class². Either used independently or together for enhanced data center benefits, these SSDs bring consistent performance and rapid responsiveness to virtual desktops, databases, e-mail, cloud services, and other business-critical applications. The company will showcase the newly certified SSDs and multiple new all-flash Virtual SAN Ready Nodes that were created in collaboration with HPE® at its VMware Europe booth (#G313).

The two SSDs join Western Digital’s portfolio of more than 200 WD®-, HGST- and SanDisk-branded NVMe, SATA and SAS SSDs, software and hard disk drives (HDDs) certified for VMware vSphere®, Virtual SAN™ or VMware Cloud Foundation™.

“With the certifications of our CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD and NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100, Western Digital’s portfolio offers the broadest range of solutions to optimize CPU and storage resources against virtualized workloads, and addresses the full spectrum of customer use cases,” said Anand Jayapalan, vice president of enterprise and client compute solutions marketing at Western Digital. “Through our OEM and channel partners, we are enabling new VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes that provide complete hyper converged infrastructure systems specially designed with many of our customers’ most important data challenges in mind. We provide IT managers with unparalleled options – whether they are building their own software defined storage or deploying Ready Nodes in existing and new cloud environments.”

Ultrastar SN100 SSDs and CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SSDs are designed to address the growing demand for all-flash and hybrid data centers. Using a combination of the NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100 SSD for caching and SATA-based CloudSpeed SATA SSDs for high capacity allows users to create a high-performance all-flash Virtual SAN optimized to manage heavy and/or unpredictable web traffic in cloud environments. The CloudSpeed Eco Gen II can also be used as a reliable and economical cache tier with the HGST-branded Ultrastar Helium platform HDDs for high capacity in a Virtual SAN node to address different price points for data warehousing, corporate file systems, data backup, and archiving.   

The Ultrastar SN100 SSD is ideally suited for large data centers and cloud service environments with massive and/or mixed-workloads. Offering up to 3.2TB³ of capacity and the speed of NVMe, it delivers low-latency, predictable performance for even the most intensive applications, enabling data centers in VMware environments to process more transactions per second, while decreasing the IT resources needed to support them. The Ultrastar SN100 SSD features VMware’s in-box NVMe driver and is available in a 2.5-inch form factor, which help make data center deployment easy.

The CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SSD enables hybrid and private cloud service providers to deploy cost-effective flash storage capacity to address increased data volume. This can allow data centers in VMware environments to deliver services for a wider range of customers and improve the diversity of applications they support, while keeping total cost of ownership (TCO) low. The CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD is available in capacities ranging from approximately 480GB⁴ to nearly 2TB⁵. It offers highly reliable throughput, with sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second⁶, all with low power consumption and outstanding data loss protection.

“We are working closely with Western Digital to accelerate flash adoption across the software-defined data center,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware.  “The new Virtual SAN Ready Nodes and certifications of the CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SATA SSD and Ultrastar SN100 PCIe NVMe SSD make incorporating the benefits of enterprise flash easy for businesses looking to regain competitive advantage with IT.”  

New Western Digital Virtual SAN Ready Nodes for VMware Environments Available through HPE® Western Digital collaborated with HPE to introduce five new ways for VMware data center customers to cost-effectively extend to their storage possibilities utilizing SAS extenders and the SanDisk®-branded Lightning series SAS SSDs. The new, all-flash Virtual SAN Ready Nodes – which offer tested and validated configurations and bundles of solutions – provide multiple potential benefits, including the ability to incorporate 33.6TB of flash storage capacity and better management of a variety of applications and workloads. Specific ready node models include: AF-6: HPE DL360 Gen9; AF-6: HPE DL380 Gen9; AF-8: HPE DL360 Gen9; AF-8: HPE DL380 Gen9 and AF8: DL380Gen9AF8 - 3.

Product Information and Availability The two newly certified SSDs are available now. Additional product detail and specifications on CloudSpeed Eco Gen. II SSD can be found here. Additional information on the Ultrastar SN100 PCIe SSD and the full Ultrastar data center solutions family is available here. For details on the new ready nodes, visit here.