QNAP and Western Digital, a look at full Flash solutions for the enterprise sector

QNAP and Western Digital

Since 1956, the year the first hard drive was invented, time has certainly passed. We've gone from room-sized devices to modern M.2 SSDs the size of a finger. Obviously, the amount of data generated in this period of time has also increased exponentially: from the 45 ZB (1 ZB = 1,000,000,000 TB) generated in 2019, it is expected to reach more than 143 ZB produced in 2024 (of which more than 90 % created by electronic devices). On the other hand, if they call it "The Zettabyte Age", there will be a reason.

An important role in this development has certainly been that of NVMe SSDs, which by far exceed in terms of sales all other types of storage. The reason is obvious: the NVMe protocol, in addition to guaranteeing direct and optimized communication with the CPU (in SATA disks, communication passed through an HBA that added a certain latency to the communications), offers 5 times higher performance than the SATA interface (at the same cost), higher quality of service, larger storage capacities and much lower TCO.

Thanks to Davide Villa, EMEAI Business Development Director at WD, and Alvise Sinigaglia, Country Manager of QNAP Italy, sportsgaming.win has analyzed for you some of the new solutions proposed by the two companies for the enterprise world.

NVMe Family Image: Ultrastar DC ZN540, Ultrastar DC SN640, Ultrastar DC SN840 Western Digital relies on NVMe standard introducing it on two new products designed for Data Centers: Ultrastar DC SN840 and Ultrastar DC SN640, whose technical specifications are as follows.

Performance NVMe Mainstream NVMe U ltrastar DC SN840 Ultrastar DC SN640 Interface PCIe 3.1 1 × 4, 2 × 2, NVMe 1.3c PCIe 3.1 1 × 4, NVMe 1.3c Form factor U.2. 15 mm U.2. 7 mm Life / Capacity [GB] 3 DW / D: 1600, 3200, 6400

1DW / D: 1920, 3840, 7680, 15360

2 DW / D: 800, 1600, 3200, 6400

0.8 DW / D: 960, 1920, 3840, 7680

NAND 3D TLC 3D TLC Maximum speed R / W sequential [MB / s] 3470/3300 3300/2170 Maximum speed R / W random [KIOPS] 780/257 473/116 UBER reliability: 1 on 10 ^ 17

MTBF (M hours): 2.5

AFR: 0.35% UBER: 1 on 10 ^ 17

MTBF (M hours): 2

AFR: 0.44% Safety SE, ISE, TCG Ruby, (soon also FIPS 140-2) SE, ISE, TCG Ruby In collaboration with Western Digital also , QNAP also introduces the TS-h2490FU, an all-flash array ready to change the cards: offering space for 24 hard drives, promises random read / write performance up to 472,000 / 205,000 4K IOPS, security-focused ZFS file system of data and technology to reduce the space occupied by data, which pushes to the maximum on file compression.

TS-h2490FU comes in two versions: 7302P-128G (slightly more performing) and 7232P-64G, which differences are summarized in the following table.

TS-h2490FU-7302P-12 8G TS-h2490FU-7232P-64G CPU AMD EPYC 7302P 16C / 32T AMD EPYC 7232P 6C / 16T RAM 128 GB DDR4 RDIMM ECC (8 x 16 GB) 64GB DDR4 RDIMM ECC (8 x 8 GB) Ports 4 x SFP28 25 GbE ( 25G / 10G / 1G) + 2 x 2.5 GbE (2.5G / 1G) 2 x SFP28 25 GbE (25G / 10G / 1G) + 2 x 2.5 GbE (2.5G / 1G) The second generation AMD EPYC processor (Rome) it was chosen primarily because it was designed specifically for data centers and for managing very intense workloads. Created with 7 nm production process, a maximum of 64 cores and improved efficiency, it allows you to quadruple the speed of floating point operations and double the performance of the CPU socket.

In terms of connection, the TS-h2490FU is equipped with Broadcom Netxtreme-E Series network card, Mellanox Connect X-4 Lx or alternatively with any 25GbE card of the same level as the two already mentioned, and will obviously be compatible with 10GbE SFP + and 1GbE SFP networks .

On the rear panel we find:

2 inputs for 1100W power supply 5 PCIe 4.0 slots 2 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports 1 COM port Power button Reset button 2 USB 3.1 Type-A ports 4 ports 25 GbE (version 7302P-128G, while they are 2 on version 7232P-64G) Another gem of this array is certainly the QuTS hero operating system, which focuses heavily on efficiency, integrity and data protection, as well as to protect you in the event of an improvised loss data isa. Worthy of note are certainly the ZFS file system, which guarantees a very high compression of the data size thanks to the inline compression function, which also contributes to significantly increase the life time of SSDs, as well as the WORM technology (Write Once Read Many times ), used to avoid modification of the saved data and therefore guarantee its integrity.

Western Digital and QNAP have therefore decided to offer companies that rely on their products a quality of service and user experience that , at least for the moment, it seems to have no comparison in the current landscape of data center storage.

If you are looking for less "enterprise" solutions and more for personal use, we recommend this excellent SanDisk Extreme external SSD currently on offer on</a></a> Amazon</a>!