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HGST, formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (now part of Western Digital), is announcing the industry’s fastest and most advanced enterprise muti-level cell (MLC) SAS SSD family. The Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM, and the Ultrastar SSD1000MR are the first drives to double today’s standard SAS interface of 6 GB/s to now achieve an amazing 12 GB/s interface. HGST’s new 12 GB/s SAS SSDs will increase input/output operations per second (IOPS) and improve response times in both traditional datacenter environments, and in cloud applications. These drives are designed for the demanding applications where “hot” data is frequently accessed, such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming and big data analytics.
Modern IT and cloud hyperscale datacenters now have high access level processing functions stored on SSDs that are paired with high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) that store the bulk of the less frequently accessed data and applications in tiered infrastructures. This array of high-performance SSDs and high-capacity, high-performance enterprise-class HDDs offer greater economies and efficiencies of scale, improved utilization of assets, and help drive lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
According to Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director for Solid State Drives and Enabling Technologies at IDC, “SSDs along with high-performance and high-capacity HDDs are the main building blocks of choice for traditional IT and cloud hyperspace datacenters and represent a market that is expected to grow in excess of $16 billion by 2015. SSDs, such as HGST’s new SAS SSD family, continue to improve generation to generation to meet today’s enterprise workload requirements while driving down the price points to support high I/O applications.”
The new Ultrastar SSD800MH 12 GB/s SAS SSD delivers sequential throughput of up to 1200 MB/s for large block reads, and up to 750 MB/s writes. Their ability to deliver up to 145,000 read IOPS and 100,000 write IOPS (more than 100 X faster than HDD) allows rapid access to “hot” data from improved operating efficiency and productivity.
HGST’s new SSD series will be offered in three endurance levels — high endurance, mainstream endurance and read-intensive endurance. The new Ultrastar SSD800MH high endurance SSD is rated for 25 full drive writes per day (DW/D) for five years. These are a great fit for high-frequency trading or online transaction processing. The Ultrastar SSD800MM mainstream endurance version rates at 10 DW/D for five years, which is ideal for cloud comptuing, big data, or online gaming. The read-intensive 1 TB Ultrastar SSD1000MR rates at two DW/D for five years, which is perfect for audio/video streaming, cloud computing and other internet applications.
The new Ultrastar 12 GB/s SAS SSDs will feature LSI controllers. Bill Wuertz, senior vice president and general manager, RAID Storage Division, LSI Corporation states that “LSI and HGST have acheived a number of key milestones, including compatibility testing of the fastest 12 GB/s SAS RAID controllers and SSDs, and are prepared to lead the industry transition and market adoption of the new 12 GB/s SAS interface standard. As the preferred enterprise interface of the future, 12 GB/s SAS is essential to unleashing the full performance of SSD storage solutions to help datacenters and cloud environments contend with massive data growth and accelerate application performance. It is also backward compatible with 6 GB/s SAS for investment protection in current SAS infrastructures.”
And from Brenda Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST: “With the industry’s highest SAS SSD performance, three endurance-level options, high-capacity and proven reliability, HGST offers the most advanced 12 GB/s SAS SSDs for the enterprise where it is critical SSDs and HDDs integrate seamlessly in tiered storage environments for optimal efficiency. Combining more than 50 years of design and qualification experience with proven HGST SAS implementation across interface hardware and firmware, HGST’s new line of MLC SSDs provide simple, scalable and flexible solutions that ensure system compatibility and ease of integration into new or existing enterprise storage systems and designs.”
The HGST 12 GB/s SAS SSDs are currently qualifying with select OEMs. Broader qualification samples are now available, with channel distribution anticipated for June of 2013. The Ultrastar 12 GB/s SAS SSD family is targeted to an annual failure rate (AFR) of 0.44%, or 2,000,000 hours for mean-time-between-failures (MTBF). They are backed by a five year warranty (or maximum petabytes written). The HGST press release for the Ultrastar 12 GB/s SAS SSD family can be viewed in its entirety here.
Amazing! HGST is the best. Go HGST!