VDURA pairs V5000 flash with WD Data60 and Data102 disk shelves

Doubling down on its hybrid flash-disk storage concept, parallel file system supplier VDURA is tiering WD disk shelves with its all-flash V5000 system.

The aim is to marry SSD low latency and bandwidth with bulk disk storage to increase parallel file system capacity without compromising its performance. The context these days is, of course, AI and SSD supply shortages. VDURA says flash storage alone cannot economically address the petabyte-scale capacity requirements of modern AI pipelines. Adding in the WD JBODs enlarges system capacity within a single, unified namespace without compromising on speed.

Chris Girard, VP of product management at VDURA, said: "Our collaboration with WD enables customers to deploy petabyte-scale mixed fleet architectures where VDURA's parallel file system intelligently tiers data across flash and HDD, keeping GPUs fed while dramatically reducing the cost per terabyte of their AI data pipelines."

The V5000 hardware has 1 RU VeLO director nodes coupled with 5 RU VPOD storage nodes, all controlled by the VDURA Data Platform (VDP) software, incorporating the PanFS parallel file system. V12 of the VDP software featured scale-out metadata compute, system-wide snapshots, and supported shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk drives. 

WD's Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 JBODs are enclosures holding up to 60 or 120 SAS or SATA disk drives respectively. Up to four units can be daisy-chained together and a unit has up to 12 x 12 Gbps SAS-3 host connections.

The Data60 can have up to 60 x 32 TB drives for 1.92 PB of capacity, while the Data102 scales out to 102 x 32 TB drives for 3.26 PB. Both JBODs are 4 RU in size and should support WD's recently-announced 40 TB UltraSMR drives and their successors.

The Data60 and Data102 also support up to 24 SSD slots for mixed-media configurations, and that's why WD calls them Hybrid Storage Platforms. 

Scott Hamilton, senior director of product management, marketing, and customer experience at WD, said: "By qualifying our Ultrastar Data60 and Data102 Hybrid Storage Platforms within the VDURA architecture, we're enabling customers to build AI data pipelines that combine the density and cost-efficiency of HDD with the intelligent data management needed to keep GPUs fully utilized."