Western Digital has extended its platform chassis business at Computex with a new disk drive box, NVMe SSD box, qualified partner SSDs, and an extended compatibility lab.
The company, before the SanDisk split, had a storage systems business, which included IntelliFlash arrays, ActiveScale object storage systems, the Kazan Networks PCIe-to-NVMe bridge business, and Ultrastar JBODS and OpenFlex JBOFs. This business was ultimately discontinued, with some components sold off – IntelliFlash to DDN in 2019 and ActiveScale to Quantum in 2020. That left it with the Ultrastar and OpenFlex chassis, and RapidFlex PCIe-NVMe bridge technologies grouped under a platforms banner. It spun off the Sandisk NAND fab and SSD business earlier this year, leaving its revenues overwhelmingly dominated by disk drive sales, yet it retained the SSD side of the platforms business and is now emphasizing its commitment with this set of releases.
Western Digital is announcing a new Ultrastar Data102 JBOD that is OCP ORv3 compliant, the OpenFlex Data24 4100 Ethernet-connected JBOF (EBOF) with single-port SSDs, which complements the existing 4200 with its dual-port SSD, new SSD qualifications for the OpenFlex chassis, and new capabilities in Western Digital’s Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL).
Kurt Chan, VP and GM of Western Digital’s Platforms Business, stated: “With OCCL 2.0 and our latest Platform innovations, we’re not just keeping up – we’re setting the pace for what modern, disaggregated, and software-defined datacenters can achieve. We remain deeply committed to enabling open, flexible architectures that empower customers to build scalable infrastructure tailored to their evolving data needs.”
The Ultrastar Data102 3000 ORv3 JBOD is designed to meet the Open Rack v3 (ORv3) specification, which focuses on rack design and power supply regulation. It complies with Rack Geometry Option 1, uses building blocks from the Data102 3000 series such as controllers, enclosures, and Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs), and is compliant with FIPS 140-3 Level 3 and TAA standards.
This chassis features up to 2.44 PB of raw capacity in a 4RU enclosure with 102 drive slots. There can be dual-port SAS for high availability or single-port SATA for cloud-like applications and economics, and up to 12 x 24 Gbps SAS-4 host connections.
The OpenFlex Data24 4100 EBOF is designed for cloud-like environments where high availability is not a primary requirement. It uses single-port SSDs, up to 24 of them, where redundancy is provided by mirroring the storage system.
Western Digital says it has qualified SSDs from DapuStor, Kioxia, Phison, Sandisk and ScaleFlux with more vendors in the qualification process.
The Western Digital Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL) was set up in August 2019, Colorado Springs, to encourage support for open, composable, disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). It provided interoperability testing with partners like Broadcom and Mellanox for NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) systems, like its OpenFlex components, and therefore involved SSDs.
It is now launching OCCL v2.0, saying it will provide testing across disaggregated compute, storage and networking for NVMe-oF architecture systems – still having an SSD focus unless NVMe-accessible disk drives are in development – and components featuring:
- Detailed solution architectures with guidance on deploying and managing composable disaggregated infrastructure effectively.
- Disaggregated storage best practices.
- Industry Expertise sharing strategic insights and innovations in the field of composable infrastructure.
- SSD partner benchmarking with comprehensive results from benchmarking tools to evaluate the performance of SSD partners, ensuring optimal storage solutions.
OCCL 2.0 ecosystem participants include Arista Networks, Broadcom, DapuStor, Graid Technology, Ingrasys, Intel, Kioxia, MinIO, Nvidia, OSNexus, PEAK:AIO, Phison, Sandisk, ScaleFlux, ThinkParQ BeeGFS, and Xinnor.
The Data24 4100 is expected to be available in calendar Q3 2025 with the Data102 3000 expected in calendar Q4 2025.
Visit Western Digital at Computex in Taipei, at booth J1303a in Hall 1 Storage and Management Solutions at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center from May 20-23.
