SC19: Liqid and Western Digital Collaborate to Deliver Fully Managed NVMe-oFtm Open Composable Platform for Shared Accelerated Storage

Supercomputing 2019 (booth #1889) -- Liqid, provider of the world's most comprehensive composable infrastructure platform, today announced its collaboration with Western Digital (booth #1275) to demonstrate NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oFtm), leveraging Liqid's software to manage the OpenFlex open composable platform across low-latency Ethernet fabrics. Liqid Command Center 2.2 software also composes the OpenFlex platform in tandem with GPU and CPU resources up and down the hardware rack and across multiple racks for multi-petabyte storage capacity at NVMetm speeds. By enabling IT users to aggregate and share large pools of data center resources over distance, while also allowing for more granular resource management and automation at the stack level, Western Digital and Liqid are showcasing an expansive, multi-fabric composable system designed to dynamically maximize resource utilization and performance wherever physical hardware resides.

"Our OpenFlex composable platform is purpose-built for disaggregated deployment in the world's most data-intensive environments that require agile, optimized storage performance for diverse and unpredictable workflows," said Scott Hamilton, Senior Director of Product Management in Western Digital's Data Center Business Unit. "Liqid's Command Center software leverages Western Digital's Open Composable API to orchestrate OpenFlex platform resources enabling faster NVMe-oF deployments and further expanding the scope of composable resources. With OpenFlex and Liqid, IT users can create more precisely balanced, disaggregated systems that can scale to meet evolving business requirements."

Western Digital OpenFlex and Liqid Command Center 2.2 Deliver Unprecedented Value

OpenFlex E3000 and F3100 Series from Western Digital allows storage to be disaggregated from compute, enabling applications to share a common pool of NVMe storage capacity. Data can easily be shared between applications, or needed capacity can be allocated to an application regardless of physical location combining multiple, modular OpenFlex storage fabric devices in a single rack or across multiple enclosures.

OpenFlex E3000 and F3100 series devices feature:

• Access to data from anywhere in the data center via ultra-low latency NVMe-oF
• Up to 61.4TB capacity per device, each featuring dual-port 50GbE fabric connections
• Up to 10 F3100 devices per E3000 enclosure
• Massive NVMe performance delivering up to 110 GB/s and 22 million IOPS per OpenFlex E3000 enclosure
• Deliver the data locality benefits of direct-attached NVMe (low latency, high performance) with the agility and flexibility of composable storage
• Hot-swappable power supplies, fans, and fabric devices ensure maximum availability without operational interruption

Liqid's Command Center 2.2 composable software is fully integrated with Western Digital's Open Composability API to enable manageability and automation of the full appliance enclosure, including data volume management, sensor monitoring, power usage, fan speeds, and other critical activities. Compose for resources inside the appliance, and connect multiple OpenFlex-based racks together with Liqid software, sharing connected devices across the data center, and creating multiple petabytes of dynamic, pooled and managed OpenFlex-driven storage.

"By coupling Liqid's award-winning, multi-fabric software with the powerful OpenFlex platform from Western Digital, we deliver fully composable NVMe-oF, with a disaggregated system built from the ground up for adaptive performance associated with artificial intelligence and other data-intensive applications," said Marius Tudor, vice president, Sales & Marketing, Liqid. "In addition, Liqid Command Center 2.2 enables IT users to connect the OpenFlex platform with additional disaggregated hardware such as FPGA, NVMe, and Intel® Optanetm memory technology, for applications that can benefit from GPU-oF performance to deliver industry-leading, dynamic, highly scalable data center environments."

Liqid Command Center delivers unified multi-fabric support for composability across all major fabric types including PCIe Gen 3, PCIe Gen 4, Ethernet, Infiniband, and lays the foundation for the upcoming Gen-Z and CXL specifications. Liqid's upcoming release of its Command Center 2.2 software will enable IT users to dynamically compose servers from pools of CPU, GPU, FPGA, NVMe, Intel Optane memory technology, and networking, regardless of underlying fabric type.

Go to www.liqid.com to schedule a demo and discuss the latest Liqid composable solutions and services, and download the free analyst report on Liqid composable infrastructure solutions from The Evaluator Group. Follow Liqid on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest Liqid news and industry insights.

About Liqid

Liqid provides the world's most-comprehensive software-defined composable infrastructure platform. The Liqid Composable platform empowers users to manage, scale, and configure physical, bare-metal server systems in seconds and then reallocate core data center devices on-demand as workflows and business needs evolve. Liqid Command Center software enables users to dynamically right size their IT resources on the fly. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit www.liqid.com. Follow Liqid on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.