Software-defined data centre rack flaunts NVMe SSD caching
Article By : Samsung Electronics
The VMware Cloud Foundation-based software-defined data centre packs two Samsung PM1725 NVMe SSDs as the caching tier and six Samsung PM863 SATA SSDs as the capacity tier.
Samsung Electronics has joined forces with VMware to unveil what they say is an operational prototype of a VMware Cloud Foundation-based software-defined data centre (SDDC) rack that utilises NVMe solid state drives (SSDs). The strategic partnership churned out the rack that was developed using six Dell R730XD servers, each configured with two Samsung PM1725 NVMe SSDs as the caching tier and six Samsung PM863 SATA SSDs as the capacity tier.
The prototype 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, indicated the companies.
The PM1725 SSD, chosen for the caching tier, enables enterprise scale-up storage systems to leverage the low latency and extremely high efficiency of the NVMe interface, noted Samsung. Based on Samsung’s 3bit MLC V-NAND technology and the NVMe 1.2 standard, the PM1725 features a native PCIe Gen-3 x8 interface, allowing a single drive to deliver up to one million random read IOPS and 140K random write IOPS, as well as reading sequentially at up to 6Gbyte/s and writing sequentially at 1.9Gbyte/s. The PM1725 can also provide five drive writes per day (DWPDs) of write endurance for five years, allowing it to support write-intensive enterprise caching applications, as well as read-intensive primary storage.
![[Samsung VMware]](/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/SamsungNVM.jpg)
__Figure 1:__ *The PM1725 SSD allows enterprise scale-up storage systems to use the low latency and high efficiency of the NVMe interface.*
For the capacity tier, Samsung’s PM863 promises flexibility for servers and storage systems. The PM863 is available in a range of capacities, from 120Gbyte to 3.84Tbyte in a 2.5in 7mm-thick form factor, and is powered by Samsung 3bit MLC V-NAND technology.
VMware Cloud Foundation brings together the power of vSphere, VirtualSAN, NSX and SDDC Manager into a natively integrated stack that makes it extremely easy to deploy and operate an SDDC, according to VMware. It includes automated installation, configuration and deployment of the virtual infrastructure stack. The automation 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. It also can reduce the TCO through simplified and automated infrastructure lifecycle management, including day-to-day operations and upgrade/update management.
