Western Digital expands NVMe SSD portfolio for cloud and edge workloads
Western Digital on Tuesday announced it's expanding its data center portfolio with two new NVMe drives that can meet the needs of public or private cloud deployments, hyperscale cloud environments and workloads at the edge. The new drives serve as a replacement for for lower-performing SATA SSDs, Western Digital says.
First up is the new Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN630 NVMe SSD, a 2.5-inch small form factor enterprise-grade NVMe SSD optimized for cloud storage. Western Digital says it delivers more than three times the IOPS for mixed workloads than legacy SATA drives. For mixed-use workloads, the drive comes in capacities between 800 GB and 6.4 TB with two drive-writes per day.
For read-intensive workloads, capacities are available from 960 GB to 7.68 TB with 0.8 DWD. It's designed for latency-sensitive applications, including software-defined or hyper-converged infrastructures, OLAP, media streaming and IoT applications.
Next, the Western Digital CL SN720 NVMe SSD offers capacities from 256 GB to 2 TB in the M.2 form factor. It's designed for edge servers, content delivery networks, cloud-based gaming and IoT platforms and gateways. Western Digital says it enables high random read IOPS performance, as well as optimal endurance with encryption capabilities.
As Western Digital notes, NVMe is gaining traction for everything from traditional database applications to emerging edge computing architectures, thanks to the scalability and performance benefits. Last year, ZDNet explored how NVMe SSDs are changing how people configure systems and manage their workflows.
"For our cloud and hyperscale customers, performance, economics, and endurance at scale are paramount," Eyal Bek, Western Digital's VP for data center and client computing devices, said in a statement.
The CL SN720 is shipping now. Western Digital is currently sampling the Ultrastar DC SN630 SSD with select customers, with broad availability expected in April.