Western Digital and AMD Address Memory Scaling Demand for Fast-Growing In-Memory Computing Workloads

Western Digital® Ultrastar® DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive with AMD EPYC™ processors overcome DRAM limitations and costs for in-memory computing workloads targeted at real-time analytics, in-memory databases, and time-sensitive workloads

Western Digital Corp. WDC today announced the latest memory extension solution with AMD to meet the need of a growing number of customers to scale addressable memory sizes of existing servers for business-critical in-memory workloads such as real-time analytics. The combined solution of AMD EPYC™ processors with the Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive expands memory footprints at a higher memory-per-core ratio, in a scalable and cost-effective way.

Western Digital is exhibiting at RedisConf19, April 2-3, 2019 in San Francisco on Pier 27, Booth #19, and will showcase how the Ultrastar memory drives can help cloud architects and DevOps leverage memory drive technology in a variety of servers and industry-leading processors to scale Redis™ in-memory data sets for larger memory pools with lower TCO. The Redis community will also learn how they can optimize Redis data management and operations for containerized microservices, conduct Redis backups, deploy multi-cloud architectures, and build innovative applications for web-scale performance.

"For customers needing access to a broader memory footprint at a higher memory-per-core ratio, a server using AMD EPYC processors and Ultrastar memory drives can significantly scale addressable memory sizes of existing and new servers for in-memory applications and databases," said Raghu Nambiar, CVP & CTO, datacenter ecosystems and application engineering, AMD. "This means that customers can achieve increased productivity with additional cost savings from greater addressable memory density, as well as reduced data center operations and resource consumption."

Introduced in October 2018, the Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive is drop-in ready and PCIe-device compatible for scalable in-memory computing to address higher application performance needs and increasingly dynamic workloads and architectures. The latest version of the Ultrastar memory drive now supports AMD EPYC processors so cloud architects, DevOps leaders and digital platform managers can accommodate ever-growing data sets onto larger memory pools by augmenting DRAM without requiring changes to existing Linux® OS and application stacks.

The Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive improves the AMD EPYC processor-based server memory-to-core ratio compared to conventional scale-out DRAM compute clusters using only DIMMs. The memory expansion scalability of the Ultrastar memory drives also enables lower TCO of in-memory infrastructure through consolidation. For example, a cluster holding 30TiB of data in memory, using 30 nodes of 1TiB each, can be reduced to only eight nodes with 4TiB system memory each, with the added benefit of increased per-node CPU utilization.¹ The Ultrastar memory drive is an ideal solution for in-memory database engines like SAP® HANA®, Oracle®, IBM®, and Microsoft®, as well as scale-out memory-centric architectures, such as, Redis, Memcached, Apache Spark™ and large-scale databases.

"AMD EPYC processor-based servers, combined with Ultrastar memory drives, can greatly increase the amount of overall memory per server to provide more cost-effective data center infrastructure for in-memory applications," said Eyal Bek, vice president, data center and client computing devices at Western Digital. "We are deeply committed to working with partners like AMD to improve the ability of digital business customers to grow data sets without the imposing data center infrastructure costs."

Western Digital Ultrastar DC ME200 memory extension drive

Available now, the Ultrastar memory drive is drop-in ready and PCIe-device compatible with most servers. Available in 1TiB, 2TiB and 4TiB, the solution requires no modifications to the operating system, system hardware, firmware or application stacks. For expandability, a 1U server can typically support up to 24TiB of system memory using the Ultrastar memory drive for in-memory compute clusters. Supported server interfaces are NVMe™ and PCIe with either U.2 or AIC (add-in-card) HH-HL form factors. Additional product information can be found here.

Related Western Digital Resources:

Solution Brief: Scale Redis Memory Configurations for Larger Data Stores and Caching
Blog: Step-by-Step Ultrastar memory drive boot process
Blog: Scaling Redis™ Memory, Data Management and Operations
Video: Memory Expansion – Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Drives
Data Sheet: Ultrastar® DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive

Western Digital's full data center portfolio includes the IntelliFlash™ hybrid, all-flash and NVMe all-flash storage systems; ActiveScale™ petabyte-scale, hybrid-cloud object storage system; OpenFlex NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVM-oF) open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar server and storage platforms; Ultrastar memory extension drive; and its family of Ultrastar data center-class HDDs and SSDs.

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About Western Digital

Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. The company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data. Western Digital data-centric solutions are marketed under the Western Digital, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, Upthere™ and WD® brands.

¹ Memory capacity is indicated by GiB and TiB and based on binary values such that one gibibyte (GiB) is equal to 2³⁰ bytes and one tebibyte (TiB) is equal to 1024 GiB (2⁴⁰) bytes. Accessible capacity can vary from stated capacity due to software, formatting, and other factors.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the applications, benefits, capabilities, features and performance of Western Digital's memory extension products. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: volatility in global economic conditions; business conditions and growth in the storage ecosystem; impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance and cost of commodity materials and specialized product components; actions by competitors; unexpected advances in competing technologies; our development and introduction of products based on new technologies and expansion into new data storage markets; risks associated with acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties listed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recently filed periodic report to which your attention is directed. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances change after the date of this release.

© 2019 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, G-Technology, SanDisk, Upthere, WD, and Ultrastar are registered trademarks or trademarks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. AMD, the AMD logo, EPYC, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The NVMe word mark is a trademark of NVM Express, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

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