Samsung has partnered with VMware to develop the first fully-operational prototype of a VMware Cloud Foundation-based software-defined data center (SDDC) rack that uses NVMe SSDs. The new prototype will be demonstrated today at VMworld at the Samsung booth. The new VMware Cloud Foundation-based rack leverages six Dell R730XD servers, each configured with two Samsung PM1725 NVMe SSDs as the caching tier, and six Samsung PM863 SSDs as the capacity tier. Samsung indicates that this solution spans successful imaging and bring-up of the integrated system rack, creation of a workload domain, and deployment of applications within the workload-domain-hosted VMware vSphere cluster.
Samsung has partnered with VMware to develop the first fully-operational prototype of a VMware Cloud Foundation-based software-defined data center (SDDC) rack that uses NVMe SSDs. The new prototype will be demonstrated today at VMworld at the Samsung booth. The new VMware Cloud Foundation-based rack leverages six Dell R730XD servers, each configured with two Samsung PM1725 NVMe SSDs as the caching tier, and six Samsung PM863 SSDs as the capacity tier. Samsung indicates that this solution spans successful imaging and bring-up of the integrated system rack, creation of a workload domain, and deployment of applications within the workload-domain-hosted VMware vSphere cluster.
PM1725 SSDs allow enterprise scale-up storage systems to take advantage of NVMe technology’s inherent low latency and high efficiency. It also leverages Samsung’s 3-bit MLC V-NAND technology and the NVMe 1.2 standard, featuring a native PCIe Gen-3 x8 interface. Samsung adds that this allows a standalone drive to reach up to one million in random read IOPS and 140K in random write IOPS in optimal conditions. Moreover, PM1725 is able to reach read and write sequential speeds up to 6GB/s and 1.9GB/s, respectively, and provide five DWPDs of write endurance for five years. This makes it suitable for enterprise caching applications and read-intensive primary storage. The PM863 (capacity tier) is available in a variety of capacities, ranging from 120GB to 3.84TB, in a 2.5” 7mm-thick form factor while leveraging Samsung 3-bit MLC V-NAND technology as well.
VMware Cloud Foundation combines vSphere, VirtualSAN, NSX and SDDC Manager into a natively integrated stack. According to VMware, this allows for the easy deployment and operation of an SDDC. Automated installation, configuration and deployment of the virtual infrastructure stack are all included, the former which allows customers to instantiate a cloud instance either as an on-premises private cloud, or as a per-tenant cloud instance in a public cloud. Additionally, VMware claims that this will help reduce the TCO, such as day-to-day operations and upgrade/update management.
