The massive, exponential growth of AI data is driving the need for disaggregated storage, and Western Digital sees both hard drives and SSDs in the mix.

At Computex 2025, the company announced it was expanding its Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL), added new SSD qualifications for its OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-over Fabric (NVMe-oF) storage platform, and introduced a new Ultrastar Data102 ORv3 Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) and an OpenFlex Data24 4100 with single-port SSDs.

In a briefing with EE Times, Scott Hamilton, senior director of product management at Western Digital, said the flurry of announcements are aimed at helping customers scale up flexible storage infrastructures to meet the accelerated demands of AI, machine learning and data-heavy workloads as storage is pushed outside the confines of the server.

“Disaggregated storage has ridden the coattails of software-defined storage,” he said. “The AI acceleration is providing a boost because storage is getting pushed outside the server.”

This is a departure from the hyper-converged infrastructure where storage, compute and memory are all inside the server, Hamilton said. AI has created more pressure to use the volume within the server to pack as much compute as possible so that resources like processors and memory that have much lower latency and sensitivity are more tightly connected while having the ability to share external storage.

Hamilton said Western Digital’s Ultrastar JBOD HDD enclosures are designed to fit into an Open Compute Project (OCP) rack, which are a bit wider than other form factors to enable better cooling with easy front access for better manageability, as well as DC power that runs vertically at the back of the rack.

SAS-connected hard drives have a role to play in AI driven data centers, Hamilton said, because so much data is being scraped and collected for various inference and machine learning workloads. “They’re a great candidate for that sort of bulk repository where you’re going to get all that data, and then ultimately through the AI data cycle, you’re going to start moving some of that data to more performant storage,” he said.

The OpenFlex Data24 4100, meanwhile, features single-port SSDs and is aimed at cloud-based architectures that require redundancy.

Hamilton said Western Digital is not just providing flexibility through its own products, but it is also qualifying multiple SSD vendors to help customers build out their storage infrastructure. SSDs from Kioxia, Phison, Sandisk and ScaleFlux are already qualified, with additional vendors in the qualification process, he said.

Western Digital’s Colorado Springs-based Open OCCL is also a key part of its efforts to enable disaggregated storage at scale while avoiding vendor lock-in, Hamilton said. The vendor-neutral innovation hub is designed to accelerate industry-wide adoption of open, fabric-attached storage and software-defined storage solutions.

The lab was introduced back in 2018 when NVMe-OF was new, Hamilton noted. OCCL 2.0 adds capabilities like comprehensive solutions architecture guidance for deploying disaggregated infrastructure, best practice frameworks for maximizing storage efficiency and benchmarking tools for evaluating SSD partner performance.

SAS is difficult to scale, Hamilton noted, so Western Digital sees a role for NVMe to scale up disaggregated HDD storage with a unified ethernet fabric with different tiers of storage being the ideal scenario. “Fabric makes things a lot more scalable,” he said.

In addition to the Computex announcements, Hamilton cited Western Digital’s collaboration with Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group, to deliver a new flagship top-of-rack (TOR) switch with embedded storage as another approach it is taking to reduce the need for separate storage networks and enabling disaggregation.

The joint effort will see Ingrasys manufacture the high-density TOR EBOF by leveraging Western Digital’s RapidFlex NVMe-oF bridge technology, which Hamilton said will essentially make an NVMe SSD look like an Ethernet SSD.

By: DocMemory
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