Data storage equipment maker Western Digital Corp. Tuesday introduced a new storage architecture called OpenFlex, together with a bunch of hardware devices that support it.

OpenFlex is designed to give data center operators the ability to scale compute, storage and network resources independently using software composable infrastructure.

Network World defines software composable infrastructure as a kind of a “infrastructure as code.” It works by treating compute, storage and network devices as pools of resources that can be provisioned as needed. It’s aimed at optimizing information technology resources and improving business agility.

The approach is similar to a public cloud in that resource capacity is requested and provisioned from shared capacity, with the main difference being that composable infrastructure sits on-premises in an enterprise data center. IT resources are treated as services, and the composable aspect refers to the ability to make those resources available on the fly, depending on the needs of different physical, virtual and containerized applications.

OpenFlex, Western Digital’s take on composable infrastructure, is being showcased in a new line of flash and disk NVMe-over-fabric devices the company announced Tuesday. The idea is to provide an architecture that can disaggregate compute, storage and network resources so these can be scaled and orchestrated independently of one another, the company said.

OpenFlex is designed especially for high-scale IT environments with common data sets that are being access by multiple different applications, the company said. That includes both performance-intensive applications and those more oriented toward batch analytics.

International Data Corp. analyst Ashish Nadkarni said OpenFlex could be an interesting option for enterprises that struggle to build flexible infrastructures with “inflexible building blocks.” He noted that with traditional architectures, storage and compute resources are added to increase capacity and performance, but often end up being underutilized and result in unnecessary expense.

“Western Digital’s OpenFlex architecture provides flexible composability that maximizes resource utilization in a highly scalable and flexible way, as well as eliminates the problems of ‘stranded storage,’” Nadkarni said. “In addition, its openness eliminates the ‘locked in’ barrier faced by proprietary infrastructures and paves the way for broader ecosystem engagement.”

OpenFlex works by creating independently scalable pools of flash and disk resources that can be accessed via common networking methods such as Ethernet. In addition, Western Digital has created an open application programming interface called Kingfish that allows for these resource pools to be presented as composable infrastructure.

The architecture already supports a wide range of common data center, including Apache incubated programs such as Hadoop, Spark and Cassandra, as well as container software such as Docker and Kubernetes, among others.

Western Digital said it plans to share the technical specifications for its OpenFlex devices, and will also open source the Kingfish API. The company said it’s doing this so that OpenFlex can be adopted as an open industry standard.

The new devices include the F3000 Series Fabric Device, which is available in capacities up to 61 terabytes and is designed to support performance-intensive apps. There’s also the E3000 Series Fabric Enclosure which can house up to ten F3000 devices. Finally, the D3000 Device is aimed at capacity-intensive apps and comes with up to 168 terabytes of hard disk space.

Western Digital said the E3000 and F3000 devices will be available during the fourth quarter, with the D3000 set to debut in 2019.

Images: Western Digital