HGST Announces New PCIe SSD And Caching Software — Up to 540,000 Read IOPS

HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), a Western Digital company, is announcing the launch of its new FlashMAXTMIII series of PCIe accelerator cards.  HGST’s newest PCIe SSDs offer a dramatic improvement in the price-to-performance ratio of today’s most demanding cloud and database workloads.  HGST is also introducing its new ServerCacheTM caching software that enables IT admins to add acceleration into existing storage arrays by easily and quickly creating a hybrid storage environment, utilizing any SSD.

According to Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing at HGST, “For businesses to remain competitive, application performance matters.  Data needs to be instantly accessible for real-time processing, analytics and insights.  To address this need, enterprise customers are actively looking to add flash into their storage infrastructure.  Whether focused on peak application acceleration with an all-SSD environment, improving lagging performance by tiering or using caching to leverage combined HDD and flash environments, our new hardware and software solutions help strike that balance among performance, complexity and cost.”

HGST’s FlashMAX III PCIe SSDs and ServerCache caching software are ideal for performance-intensive usage scenarios such as databases, data warehouses, big data deployment, SQL servers, or post-production video editing.  Each of these addresses the unique requirements for flash storage solutions based on capacity, performance, cost and time-to-deploy needs.

The key advantages of the FlashMAX III PCIe accelerator SSD cards include:

• New levels of application performance — Built for extreme application performance, FlashMAX III delivers up to 540,000 random 4K read IOPS and up to 200,000 mixed/sustained random IOPS (70%/30% read/write) from a single HHHL (half-height, half-length) PCIe SSD.
• Dramatic improvements in price/performance ratio — With up to double the price/performance ratio, FlashMAX III offers new levels of value over the prior generation.
• Support for the latest generation of servers — FlashMAX III supports PCI Express 3.0, the latest version of the PCI Express Interconnect supported by today’s newest server platforms.

The key advantages of ServerCache caching software include:

• Increased storage I/O performance — Eliminates storage bottlenecks by creating an SSD cache of the most frequently accessed data with up to 10X improvement in performance, utilizing any SSD.
• Low cost of adoption and simplicity — Delivers high performance with fewer SSDs, with little ongoing monitoring or expense, and requires absolutely no changes to existing storage infrastructures, applications, and backup systems.
• Compatible with a wide variety of block-based storage — Runs on any server application that is hosted on either a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Direct Attached Storage (DAS) system running Windows Server of Linux.

HGST’s new FlashMAX III series of PCIe accelerator SSD cards are rated for an industry-leading 2,000,000 hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), and are backed by a five-year limited warranty.  The FlashMAX III PCIe SSD is currently being qualified by key OEMs, and is anticipated to be available in Q3 of 2014.  HGST’s ServerCache caching software is available immediately for a free 30-day trial, and is available for purchase at an MSRP of $995.00 per physical server.

These two new products from HGST will further broaden their existing flash portfolio.  HGST is positioning itself to take full advantage of the burgeoning demand for flash storage solutions for enterprise applications.