Western Digital Enters In-Memory Computing Segment with New ULTRASTAR Memory SSD

Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), the leader in data infrastructure, today announced at Supercomputing 2018 that it has expanded the breadth and depth of its data center portfolio to enter the rapidly growing in-memory computing market segment. The new Ultrastar® DC ME200 memory expansion SSD is the company’s first product that enables users to optimize memory system capacity/performance to run memory-intensive applications to meet today’s real-time analytics and business insight needs.

< Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Expansion SSD>

“The need for fast analytics, data processing, cloud services, and high-performance computing (HPC) across industries such as healthcare, telecom and IT, and retail continues to increase the demand for in-memory computing,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president at IDC. “By extending memory capacity, Ultrastar memory SSDs help reduce the high cost of additional memory (DRAM) and address the physical limitations of available DIMM slots that make expansion cost-prohibitive.”

"As a leader in storage infrastructure, we continue to innovate and deliver solutions that enable new ways to capture, preserve, access and transform data," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of Western Digital's Devices division. "Our new Ultrastar memory SSDs enhance our leading data center portfolio to meet the growing demand for business acceleration and real-time data processing in in-memory platforms. With our proven technology leadership, data center expertise and economies of scale, we are delivering a new paradigm for in-memory computing that spans solution capacity, scale and cost-effectiveness."

Ultrastar Memory SSDs provide cost-effective, near-DRAM performance that can save significant capital and operating expenses while expanding the capacity of enterprise memory pools. With larger memory pools, application developers can take advantage of memory-aware performance and capacity optimization to scale data processing faster across multiple applications and workloads. Ultrastar Memory SSDs are ideal for in-memory applications such as Redis™, Memcached, Apache Spark™, ​​and large databases, offering higher capacity than current storage-class memory products.

Ultrastar Memory SSDs are ready and compatible with most Intel® x86 servers’ PCIe devices. The solution offers 1TiB, 2TiB and 4TiB capacities without modifying the operating system, system hardware, firmware or application stack. For scalability, a 1U server can typically support up to 24TiB of system memory using Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory SSDs in an in-memory computing cluster. Supported server interfaces are NVMe™ U.2 and PCIe AIC (Add-in Card) HH-HL. Please visit this link for more information. Ultrastar Memory SSDs are currently sampling to select customers.