Western Digital Openflex Data24

FullFlash storage with SSDs is increasingly the standard today and is replacing spinning disk technology in almost all areas. The only exceptions are backup and archiving, where high capacity is more important than performance.
Particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence , but increasingly also in large database applications, the need for high capacity is also growing without performance being allowed to suffer. In addition, several servers often need to be able to access the data, so that the use of internal data storage in the individual computers is out of the question.
However, conventional JBOD systems connected via SAS form a bottleneck , since the data throughput here is not sufficient to keep up with the SSDs. Western Digital solves this bottleneck problem with its Openflex Data24 series by using 100 Gbit Ethernet ports instead of the usual SAS connection, in which the significantly faster NVMe protocol of the SSDs is directly routed as NVMe over Fabric .
These JBOFs can be connected directly to the server via two redundant ports as directly attached storage , or alternatively to many servers simultaneously via fabric switches . A typical area of application for this product is high-performance computing (HPC) solutions where numerous computers need to access a common data pool, for example for mashine learning applications, virtualization and similar projects where a high data throughput is required. Ceph solutions also benefit from fast access to their OSD disks. For projects in the petabyte range, multiple systems can also be easily connected to the servers via switches.