Western Digital Collaborates with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware

Western Digital Corporation announced a new software-defined, all-flash storage solution, with HPE ProLiant DL Rack Servers and VMware Virtual SAN running SQL Server 2016 workloads. Leveraging SanDisk’s enterprise-grade flash storage products, the virtualized storage and server infrastructure solution offers industry-leading performance for SQL Server 2016 database, demonstrating online transaction processing (OLTP) performance results of 2.4 million New Orders Per Minute (NOPM). It helps customers significantly enhance the management of a variety of demanding workloads, including business-critical applications, virtual desktops, remote IT, disaster recovery, and more.

The new Western Digital HPE all-flash VMware Virtual SAN solution allows customers to immediately leverage the latest VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 features for their business applications and virtual desktops on the ProLiant DL360 and DL380 rack-optimized servers. The new hyper-converged infrastructure is both cost-effective and highly scalable, enabling organizations to easily incorporate additional flash and servers to meet their increasing data, user and workload demands.

“We are excited to raise the bar in the industry with a compelling hyper-converged infrastructure solution that runs the new Microsoft SQL Server 2016 software -- the most virtualized database in the industry,” said Anand Jayapalan, vice president of SanDisk client and enterprise compute solutions marketing at Western Digital. “Our collaboration with HPE and VMware enabled us to deliver optimal certified Virtual SAN all-flash options from our broad portfolio of products. This industry-leading solution is ideal for customers seeking to lower their costs (TCA/TCO) and complexity, while deploying fast, software-defined storage.”

With Western Digital flash-enablement, SQL Server 2016 customers are now able to benefit from powerful new features including enhanced “Always On Availability” groups, higher transaction rates for In-Memory OLTP and larger in-memory tables (up to 2TB from 256GB), and superior performance as highlighted by several new world records.

This software-defined storage solution is part of the Hyper Converged Infrastructure Systems (HCIS) industry trend, which is the fastest growing data center infrastructure with 68 percentage CAGR (2014-2019), according to Gartner.

“VMware Hyper-Converged Software, including Virtual SAN, enables enterprises to easily deploy high performance, flash-optimized, hyper-converged infrastructure for a variety of workloads, including business-critical applications, virtual desktops, remote IT, disaster recovery, and DevOps infrastructure,” said Skip Bacon, vice president, Products, Storage and Availability, VMware. “We are pleased to team with WDC and HP Enterprise on this new all-flash solution, which further streamlines deployment.”

The new Western Digital solution enables customers to achieve even greater efficiency than traditional shared storage by fully exploiting the deduplication, compression and erasure coding features delivered in Virtual SAN 6.2. Customers can benefit from up to seven times the storage reduction through deduplication and compression. In addition, they can further increase effective storage capacity by 50-100 percent with erasure coding, while maintaining the same protection levels using single or double parity protection (i.e. failure tolerance of 1 or 2).

The new infrastructure solution was showcased at HPE Discover 2016 in the HPE and SanDisk booths.

“We were pleased to showcase this new all-flash Virtual SAN Solution at HPE Discover 2016,” said Tim Peters, vice president and general manager of HPE ProLiant Rack Servers, Software and Enterprise Solutions. “This new SanDisk brand all-flash virtual SAN solution, based on our industry leading ProLiant DL rack servers, will provide great value for customers looking to deploy software-defined storage environments.”