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HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), now a Western Digital company, is announcing its NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100 series of PCIe solid state drives (SSDs) — the industry’s top-performing NVMe-compliant SSDs. The Ultrastar SN100 series is ideal for data center usage, including scale-out databases enabling the largest cloud and online services. These services are able to achieve an improved return on investment, as the Ultrastar SN100 series provide simplified application scaling, more database transactions per second, as well as lowered latency.
To create a server-side Flash platform solution with remarkably lower total cost of ownership (TCO), HGST combines the Ultrastar SN100 in an array utilizing the HGST Flash Software Suite and HGST Device Manager. This combination enables clustering, high availability, scaling and manageability for performance-critical applications. Utilized with MySQL, HGST’s server-side flash solutions have attained up to 40% server consolidation, while also attaining an up to 60% performance increase with no changes to existing MySQL architectures.
Scale-out and traditional databases, big data analytics and virtualization are all mission-critical applications for data centers. With this type of workload, HGST’s Ultrastar SN100 series shows its performance superiority by delivering 310,000 IOPS for mixed read/write workloads that are typical of data center usage scenarios.
According to Mike Gustafson, senior vice president and general manager for HGST’s Flash Platforms Group, “With our new Ultrastar SN100 series, HGST is helping today’s data center professionals meet one of their most important and difficult storage challenges: deliver extremely high application performance in a cost-effective manner. By standardizing the deployment process with NVMe, IT organizations can now realize unprecedented gains in terms of application performance, server consolidation, and simplified setup and management in Linux, Windows and virtualized environments. This milestone is important as it allows customers to easily implement high-capacity PCIe SSDs at scale in a variety of data center environments.”
HGST’s Ultrastar SN100 series utilize standard NVMe drivers to take advantage of PCIe, without requiring vendor-unique drivers. The Ultrastar SN100 becomes as simple to deploy as traditional storage devices, with the added benefit of superior performance. The Ultrastar SN100 series is offered as both a low-profile half-height, half-length (HH-HL) add-in card, and as a hot-swappable 2.5″ small form factor (SFF) drive for optimized serviceability. An industry-leading 3.2TB of density is available for either form factor.
The low-profile half-height, half-length add-in card is given the model number of Ultrastar SN150, and this version is already shipping. The 2.5″ form factor Ultrastar SN100s will begin to ship in May. You can view an Ultrastar SN100 series information page at HGST’s website here. Additional performance specs and warranty coverage have not yet been published.