Western Digital advances ecosystem collaboration, innovation for AI acceleration

As AI, ML and data-heavy workloads continue to accelerate, organisations face growing pressure to build flexible storage infrastructures that are scalable, efficient and sustainable. Traditional systems may struggle to keep pace with modern demands. Giving customers the flexibility to scale and the freedom to avoid vendor lock-in, Western Digital is announcing the expansion of the company’s Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL); a new Ultrastar® Data102 ORv3 JBOD and a OpenFlex® Data24 4100 with single-port SSDs; as well as new SSD qualifications for its OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF storage platform.

Open Lab. Smarter Infrastructure. OCCL 2.0 is Here.

Western Digital’s Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL) in Colorado Springs accelerates industry-wide interoperability for fabric-attached devices and software-defined storage. Designed for CSPs and enterprise customers, the OCCL serves as a vendor-neutral proving ground to simulate real-world environments and workloads—providing critical insights into system compatibility, interoperability, energy efficiency, and performance optimisation. For modern NVMe-oF architectures, OCCL provides testing across disaggregated compute, storage and networking to help customers scale more efficiently, reduce costs, and deploy with greater confidence. Key enhancements include:

Solutions Architectures: OCCL 2.0 will generate detailed solutions architectures, offering guidance on deploying and managing composable disaggregated infrastructure effectively.

Disaggregated Storage Best Practices: OCCL 2.0 will highlight best practices for disaggregated storage, helping organisations to maximize efficiency and scalability.

Industry Expertise: OCCL 2.0 will continue to be a source of thought leadership, sharing strategic insights and innovations in the field of composable infrastructure.

SSD Partner Benchmarking: OCCL 2.0 will include comprehensive results from benchmarking tools to evaluate the performance of SSD partners, ensuring optimal storage solutions.

These advancements will further solidify OCCL's role as a leading lab in the industry for creating partnerships with customers and suppliers, benchmarking for establishing architectural control points, and driving forward the adoption and implementation of new open ecosystems to replace proprietary architectures.

OCCL 2.0 growing list of ecosystem participants include: Arista Networks, Broadcom, DapuStor, Graid Technology Inc., Ingrasys, Intel, Kioxia, MinIO, NVIDIA, OSNexus, PEAK:AIO, Phison, Sandisk, ScaleFlux, ThinkParQ Gmbh/BeeGFS, and Xinnor.

New Product Enhancements for Cloud and Enterprise Workloads

At Computex, Western Digital is also introducing the new OpenFlex Data24 4100 EBOF to its Data24 4000 series, complementing the already available Data24 4200 dual-port SSD model. The Data24 4100 is designed for cloud-like environments where high availability is not a primary requirement. It uses single-port SSDs where performance is optimized via a single connection to each SSD and redundancy is provided by mirroring the storage system. This new addition ensures that customers have access to the best options for optimizing their storage infrastructure. The Data24 4100 is expected to be available in CQ3 2025.

The new Ultrastar® Data102 3000 ORv3 JBOD is designed to meet the increasing data demands of cloud data centers. In alignment with the broader Open Compute Project (OCP) initiative, the Data102 3000 ORv3 is designed to meet the Open Rack v3 (ORv3) specification, which focuses on rack design and power supply regulation. Complying with Rack Geometry Option 1, this future-ready solution is designed to deliver improved power efficiency, better airflow, and enhanced system manageability over the prior generation design. Additionally, the ORv3 version of the Ultrastar Data102 3000 leverages common building blocks from the 3000 series such as controllers, enclosures, and Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs), and complies with FIPS 140-3 Level 3 and TAA standards, making it a robust and reliable choice for modern data centers. The Data102 3000 is expected to be available in CQ4 2025.

Flexibility and Choice: Now Qualifying Multiple SSD Vendors

Western Digital’s Platforms business now offers customers enhanced flexibility and choice in building their storage infrastructure. By supporting a multi-SSD vendor strategy, Western Digital has currently qualified SSDs with leading providers such as DapuStor, Kioxia, Phison, Sandisk and ScaleFlux with additional vendors in the qualification process.

This approach empowers both Western Digital and its customers to leverage preferred suppliers while optimizing for performance, cost, and supply chain resilience. By qualifying multiple SSD vendors, Western Digital ensures that customers have access to the best possible options for their storage infrastructure, reinforcing its commitment to innovation and excellence in the industry.

“As workloads grow more complex and AI accelerates infrastructure demands, the future will be defined by those who can scale smarter, move faster, and deploy with confidence,” said Kurt Chan, vice president and general manager, Western Digital’s Platforms Business. “With OCCL 2.0 and our latest Platform innovations, we’re not just keeping up—we’re setting the pace for what modern, disaggregated, and software-defined data centers can achieve. We remain deeply committed to enabling open, flexible architectures that empower customers to build scalable infrastructure tailored to their evolving data needs.”