Western Digital Corp. announced Monday that its HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe solid state drive (SSD) is now certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere.
Optimized for easy set-up, the Ultrastar SN150 SSD for VMware environments reduces latency, and brings hyperscale-level performance and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) time to virtualized servers and cloud storage, thereby lowering total cost of ownership of VMware storage environments over traditional storage architectures by reducing performance tuning and field support costs. In server-side environments where VMware virtualization management is utilized, the Ultrastar SN150 is an ideal option for data center managers building or deploying systems on VMware Virtual SAN or vSphere.
Delivering memory-class performance with storage-class capacity and persistence, the Ultrastar SN100 Series is offered as a low profile HH-HL extension card as well as a highly serviceable and hot swappable SFF 2.5-inch drive, both with capacities up to 3.2TB. The devices connect using PCIe 3.0 x4 slots and support various operating systems through open-source NVMe drivers. HGST also offers capacity-optimized versions of the Ultrastar SN100 Series, up to 3.82TB, for applications that require additional user capacity.
The Ultrastar SN150 drive is the latest addition to the company’s full portfolio of storage solutions for VMware environments. Western Digital and its line of WD, HGST and SanDisk brands offers more than 200 different storage devices, software solutions and configurations certified for vSphere and Virtual SAN, including Fusion ioMemory PCIe SSDs, SanDisk Lightning II SAS SSDs, Ultrastar 7K6000 enterprise HDD, FlashSoft 4 for vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, and many others.
Part of Western Digital’s HGST-branded Ultrastar data center storage solutions family, the certified Ultrastar SN150 is available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor and is one of the first NVMe SSDs in the industry to utilize VMware’s in-box NVMe driver. For data center administrators, this helps eliminate the hassle of time-consuming downloads and configurations, and allows faster deployment.
The Ultrastar SN150 drive is available in capacities ranging from 1120GB1to 3820GB and offers speeds which exceed Virtual SAN’s highest performance class (Class F) specifications, enabling it to easily address the heaviest data workloads in a variety of virtualized server and storage configurations, including all-flash and hybrid configurations utilizing flash for caching and hard disk drives for storage capacity.
“Our Ultrastar SN150 PCIe drive is one of the most effective ways for data centers to extend their virtualization IT infrastructure, offering consistently high performance, with very low latency and the speed of NVMe,” said Anand Jayapalan, vice president of enterprise and client compute solutions marketing at Western Digital. “With its certification, we further broaden Western Digital’s unmatched portfolio of VMware-certified storage solutions for IT administrators managing the growing data needs of their most demanding cloud, hyperscale and enterprise applications in all-flash and hybrid Virtual SAN environments.”
“Customers racing to meet dynamic business demands look for strong business partners to simplify the adoption of new technologies,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware. “We have partnered with Western Digital to integrate the price-performance benefits of the Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD with the leading hyperconverged product, VMware Virtual SAN. Our low-risk in-box certified driver approach delights customers and reduces risk for partners.”
Compared to commonly used Virtual SAN-certified SAS products, the NVMe-based Ultrastar SN150 drive can deliver up to nearly four times the IOPS performance for 4K random reads and nearly twice the IOPS performance for 4K random writes2. Coupled with its low latency (~20 microseconds), Ultrastar SN150 SSDs are designed to give consistent, predictable performance. They are ideal for latency-sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) database workloads, fast virtual desktops, and mixed workloads environments running databases and latency-sensitive applications where response time is critical, such as e-Commerce, financial applications and in-house applications such as e-mail.
