At Computex 2018 we carved out a few minutes to check out the Wiwynn booth. In the booth, we saw an interesting JBOF design. The Wiwynn ST300 is a 1U 24-bay NVMe JBOF chassis. The solution is interesting as it combines OCP concepts with a unique spin in a 19″ rackmount design that can be leveraged in existing infrastructure.
Wiwynn ST300 1U NVMe JBOF
We are seeing a rapid transition of SAS3 and SATA storage architectures to NVMe-based architectures. The Wiwynn is an attempt to bring and OCP Lightning-like solution to the traditional 19″ rackmount market. Wiwynn is one of the major suppliers in the OCP industry and manufacturers OCP Lightning servers. Since 19″ rackmounts are still the majority of the market, Wiwynn has a line dubbed the WiRack19 that translates many of the operational benefits of OCP servers to the larger 19″ rackmount market.
Here is a look at the Wiwynn ST300 fully open. The 4×6 U.2 NVMe drive array sits in a tray that slides out from the chassis in the rack. Cable management is done internally so one does not need an additional cable management arm. Each drive is secured via a simple thumb screw. We tried removing drives on the floor model and it took about a second.
Other key features include redundant fans and power supplies. This is important since 24x U.2 NVMe drives can generate significant power and thermal requirements. The Wiwynn ST300 also includes a BMC for management since it is meant as a disaggregated direct attach storage node instead of as a network storage server. Connectivity is either for one or two hosts with PCIe 3.0 x16 of uplink capacity each. This means that the Wiwynn ST300 is rated for over 26GB/s of bandwidth and over 5.5M 4K random write IOPS.
One of the key trends we are seeing is the disaggregation of storage and compute. The Wiwynn ST300 that we saw at Computex 2018 is an example of the company taking its OCP knowledge and bringing its perspective to the 19″ rack server market.
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What type/brand of host adapter would work with this unit?
BinkyTO – their spec sheet lists two PCIe 3.0 x16 host connections, so it should be compatible with most existing HBA’s. Given the speed of most nvme drives you probably want to make sure you’ll pair it with a 16Gb/s HBA tho.
David,
*PCIe* HBAs are not common items, at least not something that I have seen promoted… What brands are you familiar with?
David and BinkyTO these are generally fairly simple PCIe internal to external adapters. The PCIe switches are in the chassis and the adapters rarely require logic. Vendors have specific parts for these when you buy their JBOFs.
BinkyTO
You can refer to this link http://www.wiwynn.com/english/product/type/details/74?ptype=37
to get more detailed information for “PCIe Re-timer card”.
You should have this accessory in a server and connect to external JBoF, ST300, though x16 miniSAS cable 🙂