Western Digital Unveils First Memory Drive
Secure memory capacity up to 8 times that of DRAM
Suitable for in-memory database applications

On the 13th, Western Digital announced the expansion of its data center portfolio targeting the rapidly evolving in-memory computing market.
The new Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive is Western Digital's first memory drive that supports the optimization of capacity and performance allocation in in-memory systems required for running demanding applications for real-time analytics or deriving business insights today.

Ultrastar memory drives provide cost-effective performance similar to DRAM, enabling companies to secure up to eight times the memory capacity of DRAM while substantially reducing investment and operating costs. Application developers can benefit from memory-aware performance and capacity optimization through a larger memory pool, and apply faster data processing to various applications and workloads.

Ultrastar memory drives, which offer higher capacity than existing storage-class memory products, are suitable for in-memory applications such as Redis, Memcached, Apache Spark, and large databases.

The Ultrastar memory drive supports easy drop-in drive replacement and provides PCIe device compatibility with most Intel x86 servers. This new solution is available in three capacities: 1 TiB (tebibyte, a unit where the stated capacity and usable capacity are the same), 2 TiB, and 4 TiB, and can be used without changing the operating system, system hardware, firmware, or application stack.

In terms of scalability, when using Ultrastar memory drives as an in-memory computing cluster, they can typically support up to 24 TiB of system memory based on a 1U server. Supported server interfaces are NVMe U.2 and PCIe AIC (add-in-card) HH-HL. The Ultrastar memory drive has been released and is currently being supplied as samples to select customers.

"Today, demand for in-memory computing is rising across various industries such as healthcare, telecommunications, IT, and retail due to requirements for faster analytics, data processing, cloud services, and HPC," said Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President at IDC. "Western Digital's Ultrastar memory drives help overcome the physical limitations of DIMM slots by expanding in-memory capacity in situations where expansion is nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive, while also helping to reduce the high costs associated with adding DRAM separately."

"We have added the new Ultrastar memory drive to Western Digital's data center portfolio to meet the growing customer demand for business acceleration and real-time data processing within in-memory platforms," said Mark Grace, Senior Vice President of Western Digital's Devices Division. "Leveraging our proven technological leadership, data center expertise, and economies of scale, Western Digital is presenting a new paradigm for in-memory computing in terms of solution scale, scalability, and cost-effectiveness."

Meanwhile, Western Digital participated in 'Supercomputing 2018,' held in Dallas, USA, from the 11th to the 16th of this month, and showcased a wide range of solutions for HPC, cloud, and analytics, including the Ultrastar enterprise-class HDD and SSD product families, including the new Ultrastar memory drive, ActiveScale and IntelliFlash systems, OpenFlex, and the Ultrastar platform.

Western Digital is pursuing brand consolidation to provide customers with better brand clarity, portfolio flexibility, and simplified choices. Existing commercial and enterprise products from Tegile, HGST, and some SanDisk and WD brands will be integrated under the Western Digital brand.