Western Digital has partnered with storage software company RAIDIX to help maximize the potential of its Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage devices in RAID applications. The RAIDIX software-supported NVMe RAID is capable of delivering up to 10 million Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPs) from 20 drives, while supporting a wide range of RAID levels to boost performance and protect data integrity.
The partnership with RAIDIX is a welcome move for customers in the channel, helping integrators and cloud companies alike to transition from Serial ATA (SATA) storage systems to the faster NVMe solutions, providing significantly higher performance and lower latencies.
Further details on the partnership and quotes from both organisations on the partnership are below, if this is of interest:
NVMe SSDs provide speed, but all enterprise environments demand high level of data protection from the storage devices. In this case you need a fault-tolerant array with the lowest performance penalty for making RAID features.
By installing RAIDIX ERA software, customers can easily implement software RAID capabilities on Western Digital Ultrastar® NVMe SSD devices. This will allow them to protect data while at the same time extract the full performance that NVMe devices can provide, without any unnecessary bottlenecks between the central processing unit (CPU) and the storage system.
Industry analyst firm IDC expects NVMe unit shipments to reach more than 79 percent of the SSD market by 2023. By allocating the processed data in vector registers of multi-core CPUs, the RAIDIX NVMe RAID solution provides rapid checksum calculation while preventing system performance degradation with a hybrid load or a storage array recovery mode in place. Overall, this helps enterprise infrastructures scale to peak demand for applications such as business intelligence, data analytics, virtualization and ERP, while delivering peace-of-mind with high reliability and redundancy.
RAIDIX software will be available to existing Western Digital NVMe storage devices customers at no extra cost on up to eight Western Digital devices.
Davide Villa, business development director, EMEAI at Western Digital, said, that “The ability to maximize the potential of our Ultrastar NVMe SSDs is crucial for us in order to best serve our customers in a data-driven age. We’re always looking at ways in which we can improve storage performance and data reliability and this partnership with RAIDIX allows us to do exactly that.
“Legacy SATA data storage solutions are not best-equipped to handle the levels of data proliferation and cloud storage that enterprise-grade businesses are now accustomed to. This partnership gives customers a cost-effective reliable RAID opportunity to switch from the SATA protocol to high-speed NVMe storage.”
Sergey Fedorov, VP of international sales of RAIDIX, added, “As businesses contend with the perpetual growth of data that is being driven by emerging technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, scalability and performance are vital considerations for storage, and an optimized NVMe solution meets those needs perfectly.
“We’re pleased to partner with Western Digital to enable high-performance RAID solutions for our customers, leveraging our software and one of the industry’s most reliable and trusted storage brands. NVMe SSDs in particular are still very much underused, specifically when it comes to network storage systems. We’re confident that our RAID software will help lead a necessary and smooth transition for those enterprises who are looking to switch to a high-performance NVMe RAID storage solution that can cope with modern day data requirements.”
