HGST Unveils The Ultrastar SN150 PCI-E NVMe SSD

NVMe storage devices offer astounding read/write speeds which make the SATA3 interface look extremely dated. Unfortunately, the NVMe storage hardware incurs a pretty hefty price premium and this doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. Nevertheless, they’re useful in high-end system and workstation environments. Today, Western Digital who owns the HGST group announced the Ultrastar SN150 PCI-E NVMe SSD which is now certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere. This creation provides hyperscale-level performance, low latency and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) in virtualized servers.

To accommodate a wide range of data centres, the Ultrastar SN150 PCI-E NVMe SSD will be available via a low-profile, half-length add-in card form factor and is one of the first drives to utilise VMware’s in-house NVMe driver. The product comes in a wide range of capacities ranging between 1120GB to 3820GB and offers wonderful speeds which exceed Virtual SAN’s Class F specifications. Anand Jayapalan, vice president of enterprise and client compute solutions marketing at Western Digital said:

“Our Ultrastar SN150 PCIe drive is one of the most effective ways for data centers to extend their virtualization IT infrastructure, offering consistently high performance, with very low latency and the speed of NVMe,”

“With its certification, we further broaden Western Digital’s unmatched portfolio of VMware-certified storage solutions for IT administrators managing the growing data needs of their most demanding cloud, hyperscale and enterprise applications in all-flash and hybrid Virtual SAN environments.”

Lee Caswell, vice president of products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware added:

“Customers racing to meet dynamic business demands look for strong business partners to simplify the adoption of new technologies,”

“We have partnered with Western Digital to integrate the price-performance benefits of the Ultrastar SN150 PCIe NVMe SSD with the leading hyperconverged product, VMware Virtual SAN. Our low-risk inbox certified driver approach delights customers and reduces risk for partners.”

Features and Specifications

• Certified for use on VMware vSphere and Virtual SAN platforms
• Enterprise-grade reliability: Flash-aware RAID, end-to-end data-path protection, advanced ECC, secure erase, power fail protection
• Supports the PCIe Gen 3.0 server platforms
• Classified at the highest performance category (Class F) for Virtual SAN
• Available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor