Western Digital is supplying NVMe PCIe-to-Ethernet RapidFlex bridge technology to Ingrasys, which will manufacture a fast, Ethernet-accessed box of SSDs for edge location use, cloud providers, and hyperscalers.
Taiwan-headquartered Ingrasys is a Foxconn subsidiary designing and manufacturing servers, storage systems, AI accelerators, and cooling systems for hyperscalers and datacenters. Western Digital is a disk-drive manufacturing business that has split off its NAND/SSD operation as Sandisk. The Ingrasys Top of Rack (TOR) Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) will, the two say, “provide distributed storage at the network edge for lower latency storage access, reducing the need for separate storage networks and avoiding trips to centralized storage arrays.”
Kurt Chan, VP and GM of Western Digital’s Platforms Business, stated: “Together with Ingrasys, we continue to accelerate the shift toward disaggregated infrastructure by co-developing cutting-edge, fabric-attached solutions designed for the data demands of AI and modern workloads. This collaboration brings together two leaders in storage infrastructure modernization to deliver flexible, scalable architectures that unlock new levels of efficiency and performance for our customers.”
Why is Western Digital involved with an SSD-filled storage chassis in the first place? This goes back to 2019, when Western Digital, then making both disks and SSDs, acquired Kazan Networks NVMe-oF Ethernet technology. It developed RDMA-enabled RapidFlex controller/network interface cards from this. A RapidFlex C2000 Fabric Bridge, with its A2000 ASIC, functioned as a PCIe adapter, exporting the PCIe bus over Ethernet, with 2 x 100 GbitE ports linked to 16 PCIe Gen 4 lanes. The C2000 could function in both initiator and target mode. The latest RapidFlex C2110 is a SFF-TA-1008 to SFF-8639 Interposer designed to fit the Ingrasys ES2000 and ES2100 EBOF chassis.
In 2023, Western Digital had an OpenFlex Ethernet NVMe-oF access Just a Bunch of Flash (JBOF), a 2RU x 24-bay disaggregated chassis, the Data24 3200 enclosure, integrating dual-port NVMe SSDs with its RapidFlex fabric bridge supporting both RoCE and NVMe/TCP. This Data24 3200 chassis could connect to up to six server hosts directly, eliminating the necessity for a switch device. A year later, Western Digital showed that it could deliver read and write I/O across an Nvidia GPUDirect link faster than NetApp’s ONTAP or BeeGFS arrays.
The OpenFlex system was envisaged as a way to sell Western Digital’s own SSDs packaged in the JBOF. Since then, the NAND+SSD operation has been split off, becoming Sandisk, and Western Digital is a disk drive-only manufacturing business, with disk drives providing some 95 percent of its latest quarterly revenues. By any measure, this RapidFlex/OpenFlex operation is now a peripheral business. It’s interesting that the Sandisk operation did not get the RapidFlex bridge technology, which is well suited for NVMe JBOF access. Perhaps Western Digital has NVMe-accessed disk drives in its future.
Western Digital claims that its RapidFlex device is the “only NVMe-oF bridge device that is based on extensive levels of hardware acceleration and removes firmware from the performance path. The I/O read and write payload flows through the adapter with minimal latency and direct Ethernet connectivity.” For Ingrasys, “this facilitates seamless, high-performance integration of NVMe SSDs into disaggregated architectures, allowing for efficient scaling of storage resources independently from compute.”
Ingrasys president Benjamin Ting said: “By combining our expertise in scalable system integration with Western Digital’s leadership in storage technologies, we’re building a foundation for future-ready, fabric-attached solutions that will meet the evolving demands of AI and disaggregated infrastructure. This partnership is just the beginning of what we believe will be a lasting journey of co-innovation.”
The Ingrasys TOR EBOF is targeted for 2027 availability. That’s quite a time to wait for revenue to come in.
