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At its 2016 Investor Day today, Western Digital is highlighting an all-flash storage platform that delivers 18 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) of performance. Using only 2-units (2U or 3.75-inch) of rack space, this represents the highest performance per rack unit in the industry. This performance is achieved through industry-standard NVMe SSDs connected to multiple servers over a PCIe switched fabric. The low latencies of these devices and the PCIe interconnect combine to deliver a winning combination of high performance and compact form factor. In addition to raw performance, the technology provides independent provisioning of capacity and performance, which is essential to the sharing of storage resources in a disaggregated cloud data center architecture. The platform is designed to provide the high availability and serviceability required to support business critical applications. The capabilities of this advanced platform are ideally suited for real-time and streaming analytics applications such as credit card fraud detection, video stream analysis, location-based services, advertising servers, automated systems, and solutions built on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or deep learning (DL).

The high-performance NVMe-over-PCIe fabric advanced flash platform will be available in the first half of calendar 2017. To foster standardization, the company plans to contribute software in support of this technology to the open source community.