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SanDisk Corporation, a world-leading producer of flash storage devices, and Supermicro Computer, Inc., are announcing that SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM(TM) solid-state drives (SSDs) will begin shipping in Supermicro’s Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms. SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM SSD is the industry’s first enterprise-class, ultra-low latency storage solution that is memory-channel connected. By adding flash storage onto the memory bus, Supermicro will be able to offer their customers a powerful storage solution that can handle ever-growing application performance needs, without significant investment in additional infrastructure.
According to John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Storage Solutions for SanDisk, “The ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application — no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive. We are very excited to partner with Supermicro in offering this innovative, ultra-low latency storage solution to help their customers accelerate the performance of their cloud, virtualization, HPC and other applications and experience the benefits of a flash-transformed data center.”
Supermicro has tested both the 200GB and 400GB capacities of the ULLtraDIMM SSDs under varied enterprise-level workloads and various end-user scenarios. Benchmarks indicated that the ULLtraDIMM SSDs offer the lowest latency storage option currently available.
Wally Liaw, Sr. Vice President of Sales for Supermicro, notes that “Supermicro leads the industry with the widest range of innovative, high performance, green computing solutions and delivers the lowest latency server and storage platforms on the market with SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM technology. With complete in-memory compute optimized solutions, we offer the most cost-effective path to scalable, ultra-low latency performance for mission-critical, data-intensive workloads in data center, cloud, enterprise, virtualization, financial services and HPC applications.”
Industry analysts IDC are anticipating that by 2015 big data workloads will make the largest contribution to cloud storage growth. Data is already being generated, processed and stored at historic levels, and with IT departments being pressured to increase performance and provide access to information in real-time, enterprises are increasingly realizing the advantages of utilizing flash-based, low-latency storage options.
Eric Burgener, IDC’s storage division research director, observes that “Memory channel storage options like SanDisk’s ULLtraDIMM consistently deliver lower storage latencies than data center SAN solutions can. There are a number of different application environments, including database, VDI, and mixed virtual workloads, that can directly benefit from these types of lower latencies, and more and more organizations are deploying them. With this design win under its belt, it’s clear that SanDisk’s partners are seeing a good market opportunity for these types of host-based storage solutions.”
SanDisk’s award-winning ULLtraDIMM SSD integrates into an existing DIMM slot, removing the performance bottleneck from the storage subsystem and ensuring ultra-low latency and improved business application responsiveness. Adding ULLtraDIMM SSDs to storage systems also scales performance and capacity with no negative impact on latency. The ULLtraDIMM SSD provides for new opportunities in server system design that can support usage scenarios requiring extremely fast storage, such as VDI and virtualization, transaction processing and cloud computing.
The ULLtraDIMM SSD is the result of a development partnership between SanDisk and Diablo Technologies, and is expected to begin shipping in Supermicro SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms in Q4 of 2014. You can view the SanDisk press release announcing the Supermicro partnership in its entirety here, and the ULLtraDIMM product page is available for viewing here.
SanDisk will be present at the 2014 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California from 8/5 through 8/7, and you can find them at booth #204 and booth #600.