Western Digital’s Trio of AI-Driven Storage Tech Unveiled at Computex 2025

At Computex 2025, Western Digital highlighted three of its latest advances:

Expansion of its Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL)
A new Ultrastar Data102 ORv3 JBOD and an OpenFlex Data24 4100 with single-port solid-state disks (SSDs)
New SSD qualifications for its OpenFlex Data24 NVMe-oF storage platform

The tech giant is fully embracing artificial intelligence and machine learning for disaggregated and software-defined storage and data centers by expanding interoperability, releasing new hardware, and optimizing its supply-chain strategy.

The OCCL 2.0

At the center of it all is Western Digital’s Open Composable Compatibility Lab (OCCL) in Colorado Springs, which is now in its 2.0 phase. This isn’t a typical vendor showcase, but rather a testbed designed to simulate real-world workloads for enterprise IT teams and cloud service providers to push the boundaries across infrastructure stacks.

According to Western Digital, the simulated environments and workloads provide critical insight into system compatibility, interoperability, energy efficiency, and performance optimization.

OCCL 2.0 introduces a number of new features, including detailed solution architecture guidance, best practice recommendations for disaggregated storage deployments, and deeper benchmarking capabilities to assess SSD performance. The lab also serves as a knowledge-sharing center, providing insights around composable infrastructure. It also offers SSD benchmarking capabilities so that vendors can see how different drives function under certain conditions.

OpenFlex Storage Hardware

Western Digital threw a spotlight on new storage hardware with the OpenFlex Data24 4100, an Ethernet-attached array that does away with dual-port redundancy in favor of single-port SSDs, effectively trimming cost and complexity. The platform functions as an Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) storage device, specifically designed for cloud-based environments. Western Digital said the OpenFlex Data24 4100 will hit the market in the third quarter of 2025.

Ultrastar 102-Bay JBOD

The company also took the opportunity to highlight its new Ultrastar Data102 3000 ORv3, a 102-bay JBOD built to the Open Rack v3 spec from the Open Compute Project. The rack offers improved power efficiency, airflow, and compatibility for the latest SSDs. It also meets FIPS 140-3 Level 3 and TAA security standards, suiting it for data center environments.

SSD Qualification

Last on the unveiling list at Computex 2025, Western Digital announced a shift toward SSD supply-chain flexibility by qualifying drives across multiple vendors, including DapuStor, KIOXIA, Phison, Sandisk, and ScaleFlux. This allows vendors to avoid being pinned to a single NAND source during periods of shortages and cost increases that were evident during the pandemic, and more recently, global tariffs.

“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,” stated Kurt Chan, vice president and general manager, Western Digital’s Platforms Business.

He added, “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.”