Great Things Come in Threes at VMworld 2017

Great Things Come in Threes at VMworld 2017

At the end of this month, over 20,000 virtualization professionals will meet in Las Vegas for VMworld 2017. If you are attending this year’s event, we invite you the come to the HGST booth #525 where you will find great solutions that deliver greater benefits or savings for your customers. Here’s why at this year’s event great things come in threes:

Three Storage Industry Leaders

First, in the HGST booth, you will be able to see the combined products and solutions from three storage leaders – HGST, SanDisk® and VMware. As a result you will have the opportunity to talk to our subject matter experts and see a broad portfolio of solutions from the largest storage and systems company and results of the long and close collaboration with VMware in virtualization solutions.

Three Transformation Drivers

Digital transformation, cloud models and next-generation IT infrastructure are driving rapid and fundamental changes in businesses and their operating models. Whether its increased speed and agility, lower operational costs, or insights and value from data – our solutions are aligned with how VMware is helping customers to:

  • Modernize the Data Centers
  • Empower the Digital Workspace
  • Integrate into Public Clouds.

At the HGST booth, you will not only be able speak to our subject matter experts on how to take advantage of the best products for your business and IT challenge, but also see innovative solutions we built with VMware and our OEM partners to execute these three imperatives and deliver customers with greater benefits and bigger savings.

You will also have the opportunity to speak to our own IT practitioners who will share how we take extensive advantage of virtualization in our infrastructure. Currently, VMware products like WorkSpace One and AirWatch are deployed to empower our digital workspace across the globe. 20,000 employees use their own devices securely and productively at all Western Digital offices and factories with these VMware technologies.

Three Do-Not-Miss Highlights

We’ll have a lot of exciting solutions and technology to share in our booth. Here are three key highlights you shouldn’t miss:

  1. One of the Broadest Portfolios

We offer one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of storage products and systems. From PCIe/NVMe™, SAS and SATA flash and all the way to innovative SMR, Helium and air-filled HDDs, we offer a broad selection of certified drives for vSAN®, HCI and cloud solutions. You’ll find capacities ranging from 300GB to the world first 12TB[1] HDD, and flash devices up to 7.68TB with the capability of performing up to 1.2M Read IOPS per device.

Stop by our booth, our experts will help you find the best performing and most cost efficient device for your workload and software stack.

  1. Tested, Proven vSAN Devices and Configuration (Spoiler Alert: They’re Fast!)

Second, you can speak to our storage experts on how we test Software Define Storage and HCI solutions like vSAN using our performance testbeds in our Data Propulsion Lab™  to brings definitive data to vSAN administrators and ReadyNode design teams.

We have worked closely with various server OEM companies, like Lenovo™, HPE and Cisco®, to deliver proven reference architectures and VMware vSAN ReadyNodes™. At VMworld 2017, we will talk about three vSAN cluster testbeds from different server companies.

One example is the configuration below using Lenovo System X 3650 M5 series servers and various SAS SSDs from our Ultrastar® family. In this configuration we tested the delivery of over 650,000 Read IOPS on a 4-node cluster with 4 disk groups per node and over 1 million Read IOPS on an 8-node cluster with 2 disk groups per node[2].

Lenovo All-Flash Virtual SAN
Fig 1: One of the three vSAN Clusters in the Data Propulsion Lab vSAN Test Bed – over 1 million Read IOPS on an 8-node cluster

Another example, below, is an all-NMVe vSAN configuration. We’re proud to be a leader in NVMe technology. Just last week, we received the PCIe NVMe SSDs award at the Flash Memory Summit, voted by IT professionals from around the world. NVMe is a disruptive technology, and VMworld 2017 will be a great opportunity to understand how it can greatly benefit your vSAN or HCI solution.

In our booth you’ll be able to see an all-flash, all-NVMe -powered vSAN solutions delivering 61TB of all-NVMe flash capacity on a 2U unit!

NVMe vSAN
Fig 2: One of the vSAN-Driven Solutions using HGST PCIe NVMe Drives on show at VMworld 2017

You can read about how we established our vSAN Performance Test Bed and details of the various configuration options in the following blogs by technologist Jonathan Flynn or attend his VMworld 2017 Breakout Session (details below):

  1. From Edge to the Cloud

Lastly, come see how our products and solutions are used all the way from edge devices and data centers to the public clouds. Whether it is our Skyhawk™ Series NVMe PCIe SSDs[3] that deliver performance and low latency optimized for hyperscale data centers and cloud workloads, our CloudSpeed II™ SATA SSDs with superior performance or high-capacity helium HDDs – our solutions are heavily relied on by cloud providers as an essential part of their infrastructure to run VMware Cloud, vSAN and ESXi.

Come talk to us about how to build an efficient cloud infrastructure.

Speaking Sessions at VMworld 2017

Hear our subject matter experts at the following speaking sessions:

Monday, August 28

Title: Empowering Digital Workspaces for Faster M&A Day 1 Systems Adoption
11:00 am
Session: LDT1406BU
Speaker: Steve Phillpott, CIO, Les Viszlai,  Strategist / Advisory Services,  VMware

Title: End-User Privacy: The Foundation of a Successful BYOD Campaign
11:00 am
Session: UEM1409BU
Speaker: Jason Walker, Principal Virtualization Architect

Title: Delivering New User Experiences with Digital Workspaces
3:30 pm
Session: EDW7002KU
Speaker: Jason Walker, Principal Virtualization Architect

Title: New Architectures for Virtualizing Spark and Big Data Workloads
5:30 pm
Session: [VIRT1351BU]
Speakers: Justin Murray and Mohan Potheri from VMware; guest appearance: Jonathan Flynn, Virtualization Technologist

Tuesday, August 29

Title: The Transformation of Identity and Access Management in the Age of the Digital Workspace
11:00 am
Session: SAAM3157SU
Speakers: Dave Schira, Global Director, IT Architect & Automation
Jason Walker, Principal Virtualization Architect

Title: Amplifying VMware vSAN Performance: A Deep Dive into Testing and Tuning (with Lessons Learned)
5:30 pm
Session: [STO2591BU]
Speaker: Jonathan Flynn, Virtualization Technologist

Wednesday, August 30

Title: Three Ways to Use VMware’s New Cross-Cloud SaaS Services to Efficiently Run Workloads Across AWS, Azure, and vSphere
12:30 pm
Session: [MMC3074BU]
Speaker: Burt Toma from VMware, Jason Walker, Principal Virtualization Architect

Title: Modernize your Infrastructure with vSAN and HCI for Data Centers and Clouds
12:30 pm
Session: [STO3373PUS]
Speakers: John Nicholson from VMware, Dror Goldenberg from Mellanox, Jonathan Flynn and
Patric Chang, Senior Director from Western Digital

Three Things (and a Prize) to Look For in Our Booth

Finally, visitors to our booth have three other items to look out for. These include a pack of Lego® bricks for those who speak to our subject matter experts, and a poker chip when you visit one of our four demo pods. By collecting the set of four poker chips, you can enter for a change to win a 3D printer! (visit our booth for full terms and conditions).

prize at vmworld 2017

Make sure to also catch our partners from Lenovo, Mellanox™, Tegile®, Cisco®, Supermicro®, Red Hat® and VMware presenting joint solutions in our booth theater. 

In summary, visit the HGST booth #525 and discover how “Great Things Come in Threes.” See our innovative products and the compelling solutions we have built with VMware and leading partners in the industry to modernize the data center, empower the digital workspace and integrate into public clouds.

Join us and see how you can harness the power of data. I look forward to seeing you at the show!


[1] One MB is equal to one million bytes, one GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to hard drive capacity. Accessible capacity will vary from the stated capacity due to formatting and partitioning of the hard drive, the computer’s operating system, and other factors.

[2] Based on tests conducted by Western Digital’s Data Propulsion Lab ™ using HCIBench.

[3] Skyhawk is used under license from Western Digital Technologies, Inc.

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