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SanDisk Corporation, a world-leading producer of flash storage devices, is announcing its new CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SATA SSD geared toward cloud service provider (CSP) and software-defined storage (SDS) vendor environments. With up to 1.6TB of usable capacity, the CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SATA SSD offers the storage performance and density required for mixed-use, low-latency-critical transactional workloads, including collaborative online services and e-commerce. The CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II delivers an unmatched price-to-performance leadership, at a little over four cents per IOPS, as compared to $3.50 per IOPS that is typical with conventional SATA HDDs. The CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SSDs provide random 4K read/write speeds of up to 32,000 IOPS, sequential data transfer speeds of up to 530MB/s, and random read/write latency of 80 microseconds. This equates to a 99.9% quality of service (QOS) level.
CSPs seek to provide superior service levels in order to deliver seamless customer experiences. Forrester Research, in a recent report, attests that business leaders are demanding next-generation applications and new insights into their use to drive better engagement and more intelligent decisions. To be able to do this, enterprise architects need to create a versatile technical architecture that can easily scale with capabilities, such as databases, that are always available to support new initiatives. In order to be able to meet service level agreements (SLAs) during peak operation periods, CSPs will often use dozens or even hundreds of SSDs in compute clusters to provide the flexible cloud infrastructures required to handle high-performance and low-latency NoSQL analytics, online transaction processing, or collaborative operations. In massive XaaS (Anything(X)-as-a-Service) environments handling mixed workloads, the metric for calculating storage infrastructure costs has moved away from dollars per gigabyte ($/GB) to dollars per IOPS ($/IOPS).
According to John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager for Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk, “The demand of transaction-oriented applications puts tremendous strain on cloud service provider customers to architect data center platforms capable of delivering high performance, while keeping infrastructure costs in check. As a trusted provider of flash storage solutions, SanDisk understands the critical need for cloud elasticity in order to raise customer service levels. With CloudSpeed UItra Gen.II, CSP and SDS companies can provide an exceptional customer experience, while reducing administrative overhead along with the number of servers and software licenses needed to support transaction and analytical databases.”
Historically, CSPs have combined HDDs with caching mechanisms to handle transactions and I/O-intensive usage scenarios. However, this can create cumbersome manual administrative costs to keep these high-performing tiers of IT infrastructure maintained. With today’s newer cloud applications, this would require exorbitant numbers of HDDs along with elaborate and expensive performance enhancement schemes to effectively meet their needs. This causes grossly inefficient use of data center resources, including space requirements. The CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SSDs are designed with value and performance in mind, providing an appealing price-to-performance ratio, and unparalleled latency-sensitive application performance to meet the elasticity needs of today’s cloud systems, increasing capacity while avoiding server sprawl.
Just like previous CloudSpeed SSDS, the CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SSDs feature SanDisk’s innovative Guardian Technology Platform, which provides a powerful combination of error detection and correction technology, full data path protection, and data fail recovery. The CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SSDs are backed by a five-year limited warranty.
CloudSpeed Ultra Gen.II SSDs will be available to select CSP and SDS customers in August of this year, and available on a staggered channel release through SanDisk’s Enterprise Channel Partner program. SanDisk will be displaying and demonstrating this week at Flash Memory Summit 2015, in Santa Clara, CA. You can visit them at booth #207.
