Western Digital Collaborates With HPE and VMware

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) announced a 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 performance for SQL Server 2016 database, demonstrating OLTP performance results of 2.4 million New Orders Per Minute (NOPM)¹ It helps customers enhance the management of a variety of demanding workloads, including business-critical applications, virtual desktops, remote IT, DR, and more.

The Western Digital HPE all-flash VMware Virtual SAN solution allows customers to 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 hyper-converged infrastructure is both cost-effective and scalable, enabling organizations to 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 SQL Server 2016 software – the most virtualized database in the industry,” said Anand Jayapalan, VP, SanDisk client and enterprise compute solutions marketing. “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 able to benefit from 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 performance as highlighted by several new world records.²

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% CAGR (2014-2019), according to Gartner, Inc.³

“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, DR, and DevOps infrastructure,” said Skip Bacon, VP, 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 Western Digital solution enables customers to achieve even greater efficiency than traditional shared storage by 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 increase effective storage capacity by 50-100% with erasure coding, while maintaining the same protection levels using single or double parity protection (i.e. failure tolerance of 1 or 2).⁴

The 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, VP and GM, 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.“

¹ Based on out-of-the-box performance characterization performed by SanDisk’s Data Propulsion lab using an RC version of SQL Server 2016, VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 and the HammerDB load testing and benchmarking tool.
² TPC-H world records.
³ Gartner Data Center Conference, 2015.
⁴  VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 datasheet