Western Digital and Hongbai Technology have reached a long-term partnership
Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) and Honbest Technology, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group, a leading global electronics manufacturing services provider, recently announced a strategic collaboration to jointly launch a new flagship top-of-rack (TOR) switch with embedded storage. This new TOR EBOF (Top-of-Rack All Flash Storage Switch) will provide distributed storage at the edge of the network to reduce latency for storage traffic, reduce the need for independent storage networks, and avoid data transmission to centralized storage arrays. With the joint efforts of both parties, Honbest Technology will adopt Western Digital's RapidFlex™ NVMe-oF™ bridging technology to manufacture high-density TOR EBOF devices. Western Digital will work with HonBai Technology to develop system architecture and lead market promotion for cloud service providers
Consumer service providers (CSPs) and storage original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are promoting NVMe-oF computing-storage separation storage solutions.
This collaboration marks an important milestone in the rapidly expanding AI market, accelerating the application of networked storage and computing separation to meet the growing needs of AI workflows. HonBai Technology has world-class manufacturing capabilities in GPU server manufacturing, and Western Digital has professional technology in NVMe-oF and networked storage. The cooperation between the two parties can establish a more flexible storage and computing separation infrastructure for data centers, bringing higher efficiency, scalability and performance to meet the challenges of large-scale AI applications.
The TOR EBOF, jointly launched by Western Digital and HonBai Technology, will be available in 2027 and represents the cutting-edge integration of network and storage technologies. This innovative TOR switch is equipped with Western Digital's next-generation RapidFlex™ architecture bridge device to achieve embedded storage capabilities, support 100G Ethernet and NVMe™/PCIe® Gen6 drive slots, and is suitable for E3.S/L SSD devices.
At its core, the TOR switch is driven by NVIDIA's Spectrum™-4 switch application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), ensuring high-performance data switching. In addition, the switch offers flexible 400/800GbE cabling options, providing a solid solution for future data center needs.
Western Digital's RapidFlex™ NVMe-oF™ bridge device is a groundbreaking solution in the field of networked storage, providing low power consumption, high performance and high flexibility for modern data centers. As an NVMe-oF™ bridge device based on deep hardware acceleration and removing firmware from the performance path, its I/O (network) read and write payloads have extremely low latency when flowing through the adapter and can be directly connected to the Ethernet network. This unique approach helps to seamlessly and efficiently integrate NVMe SSDs into storage-computing separation architectures, allowing storage resources to be independent of computing and achieve efficient expansion.
"Together with HonBridge, we are continuing to accelerate the transformation of storage-compute disaggregated infrastructure by jointly developing cutting-edge networked storage solutions for AI and the data demands of modern workloads," said Kurt Chan, vice president and general manager of Data Center Platforms at Western Digital. "This collaboration brings together two leaders in storage infrastructure modernization to provide customers with the flexibility to scale with performance and scale."
“This collaboration with Western Digital reflects our shared commitment to long-term innovation and customer-centricity,” said Anthony Ting, President of HonBridge Technology. “By combining HonBridge’s expertise in scalable system integration with Western Digital’s world-leading storage technology, we are laying a solid foundation for future-proof networked solutions to meet the future of AI and new storage computing.”
“Western Digital’s collaboration with HonBridge Technology will unleash the potential of accelerated computing by deeply integrating high-performance storage with scalable system capabilities,” said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. “As AI and data-intensive workloads continue to push the limits of infrastructure, this collaboration aims to deliver the high performance, low latency and scalable architecture required for the next generation of data centers.”