Samsung Electronics Announces Industry-First All Flash Certification from VMware for its PCIe Gen5 SSD

LAS VEGAS – August 22, 2023 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that it has obtained the industry’s first VMware All Flash Certification[1] for its PCIe Gen5 SSD, PM1743, with a goal of providing users with more optimal solutions.

“The PM1743 receiving the industry’s first All Flash Certification is a remarkable achievement, and we look forward to working even more closely with VMware in the future,” said Yongcheol Bae, Vice President of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “We are firmly committed to our goal of creating new customer value and diverse technological solutions through enhanced collaboration with VMware.”

At VMware Explore, one of the world’s largest IT events, VMware showcased its SDS[2] solution, vSAN[3]. With it, Samsung Electronics can now provide an optimal environment for users wanting to use high-performance, high-capacity storage by optimizing the parameters of its products to be used in this system.

“The next generation of AI-enabled applications is placing new demands on enterprise storage architecture,” said John Gilmartin, senior vice president, cloud infrastructure business group product management and marketing, VMware. “Together, VMware and Samsung are driving storage innovations that help process vast amounts of data more quickly, with better scale and higher performance. Combining Samsung’s latest Gen5 SSD and VMware vSAN 8 with the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (vSAN ESA) will deliver systems that help our customers unlock the full potential of AI in the enterprise.”

The previous structure of VMware vSAN was one that was largely divided into Cache Tier[4] and Capacity Tier[5], with SSDs commonly utilized for Cache Tier and HDDs used for Capacity Tier. However, vSAN will now eliminate the distinction between Cache Tier and Capacity Tier and integrate them into a Single Tier structure, using storage composed exclusively of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSDs. In conjunction with this change, Samsung has optimized the PM1743 and simultaneously improved the performance and capacity of its systems to maximize the benefits of VMware technology.

Samsung’s Gen5 NVMe drives combined with VMware Greenplum: Powerful Speed and Performance

Additionally, the companies have been working on a reference design that deploys Samsung Gen5 SSDs and VMware Greenplum to improve cost and performance ratio. By combining Greenplum’s innovative shared-nothing architecture with Samsung’s latest Gen5 NVMe drives, it is possible to redefine the boundaries of data volume, processing speed, and the scope of multimodal analytics. Read more on VMware’s blog.

[1] VMware All Flash Certification: An official certification from VMware that guarantees that VMware software operates normally on a product.

[2] SDS (software defined storage): Storage solutions that improve flexibility, scalability and efficiency by virtualizing storage resources and being managed centrally.

[3] vSAN (virtual storage area network): VMware’s vSAN is enterprise storage virtualization software that supports hyper-converged infrastructure. The software aggregates local and direct-attached data storage devices across a VMware cluster to create a single data store which all hosts can share.

[4] Cache Tier: The tier in which data is temporarily stored in advance to provide quicker access and to relieve the bottleneck phenomenon caused by the speed gap between the central processing unit and memory.

[5] Capacity Tier: The tier in which actual data is stored.