Western Digital has announced a series of enhancements to its storage portfolio aimed at supporting artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large-scale cloud environments.
The company revealed the expansion of its Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL) to version 2.0, the introduction of the OpenFlex Data24 4100 Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) storage system, the Ultrastar Data102 3000 ORv3 Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) platform, and a broader qualification programme for solid state drive (SSD) vendors.
Western Digital's OCCL 2.0 is designed to improve testing and support for disaggregated, AI-ready storage architectures.
The lab, located in Colorado Springs, acts as a vendor-neutral environment to replicate real-world environments and workloads, allowing for interoperability, performance evaluations, and energy efficiency testing across disaggregated compute, storage and networking infrastructures.
OCCL 2.0 also provides detailed solution architecture guidance to organisations deploying composable disaggregated infrastructure. It shares best practices for maximising storage efficiency and scalability, and delivers benchmarking insights for industry SSD partners to ensure optimal performance. The lab features participants from a range of technology firms including Arista Networks, Broadcom, DapuStor, Graid Technology, Ingrasys, Intel, Kioxia, MinIO, NVIDIA, OSNexus, PEAK:AIO, Phison, Sandisk, ScaleFlux, ThinkParQ/BeeGFS, and Xinnor.
Expanding its product offerings, Western Digital introduced the OpenFlex Data24 4100 EBOF as a complement to its dual-port Data24 4200 model in the Data24 4000 series.
The new single-port system is suited for cloud environments prioritising high performance over redundancy, with performance optimised through a single connection to each SSD and redundancy achieved by mirroring the storage system. The Data24 4100 is expected to become available in the third quarter of 2025.
The company also unveiled the Ultrastar Data102 3000 ORv3 JBOD platform, which aligns with the Open Compute Project's Open Rack v3 specification.
This solution is aimed at improving power efficiency, airflow and system manageability for cloud data centres. The Data102 3000 makes use of common building blocks from Western Digital's 3000 series, including controllers, enclosures, and Customer Replaceable Units, and complies with FIPS 140-3 Level 3 and TAA standards. Availability is anticipated in the fourth quarter of 2025.
In terms of supply chain flexibility, Western Digital has broadened its qualification process for SSD vendors, now supporting products from DapuStor, Kioxia, Phison, Sandisk and ScaleFlux, with additional partners in the pipeline. This strategy allows customers to choose from multiple SSD suppliers to address preferences for performance, cost and resilience.
Kurt Chan, Vice President and General Manager of Western Digital's Platforms Business, said, "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. 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."
Western Digital's strategy with these updates underscores its focus on interoperability, customer-driven design, and the provision of modular storage architectures for enterprise, cloud service, and storage-as-a-service operators. The company continues to invest in open architectures and ecosystem collaboration to support shifting demands in the software-defined and disaggregated storage domain.
