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SanDisk Corporation, a world-leading producer of flash storage devices, is announcing the Lightning Gen.II family of enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs). These Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSDs have been upgrade to a 12GB/s interface, effectively doubling the throughput over previous 6GB/s interface versions.
According to John Scarramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk, “Business data needs are becoming so performance-intensive that even applications that are already using SSDs need an additional boost. The Lightning Gen.II SAS SSDs deliver double the throughput to each slot, empowering organizations to quickly and easily scale their performance infrastructure to meet this growing need.”
SanDisk’s new Lightning Gen.II SSD series provide the highest level of performance possible for mission-critical and virtualized data center usage scenarios. The Lightning Gen.II series of SSDs also offer a robust and feature-rich design, offering powerful error detection and correction, full data path protection, thermal monitoring, instant secure erase option, and power fail recovery. The new Lightning Gen.II SSDs provide industry-topping performance, reliability and superior value. SanDisk is backing the Lightning Gen.II family of SSDs to the tune of a five-year warranty.
Travis Karr, vice president and general manager for PMC’s Enterprise Storage Division observes that “SanDisk’s Lightning Gen.II SAS SSDs offer great performance, uptime and capacity for customers with high-intensity business applications. By combining our industry-leading 12GB/s SAS Series 8 adapters, I/O controllers and expander products with SanDisk SSDs, our customers can deliver solutions that scale to keep pace with the exponential information growth in today’s data centers at the lowest cost and power possible.”
The Lightning Ultra Gen.II SSD is a high-endurance drive that achieves up to 25 full drive writes per day (DWPD), and delivers up to 190,000 random read IOPS and 100,000 random write IOPS. The Gen.II Ultra also achieves sequential reads of 1000 MB/s and sequential writes of 600 MB/s. This SSD is ideal for write-intensive usages such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and Database Logging. The Gen.II Ultra is offered in capacities from 200GB to 800GB.
The Lightning Ascend Gen.II SSD is a mixed-usage SSD that achieves up to 10 full drive writes per day (DWPD), and delivers up to 190,000 random read IOPS and 80,000 random write IOPS. The Gen.II Ascend achieves sequential reads of 1000 MB/s and sequential writes of 600 MB/s. This SSD is a good fit for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Exchange File Servers, On-Line Transaction Processing (OTP), and E-Commerce. The Gen.II Ascend is offered in capacities from 200GB to 1.6TB.
The Lightning Gen.II ECO SSD is more of an entry-level enterprise drive, and delivers up to 180,000 random read IOPS and 35,000 random write IOPS. The Gen.II ECO achieves sequential reads of 1000 MB/s and sequential writes of 500 MB/s. This SSD is great for high-performance workloads, including Data Warehousing, Media Streaming, Cloud Computing and Video-on-Demand (VOD). The Gen.II ECO is offered in either 1TB or 1.6TB capacities.
SanDisk will be sampling the Lightning Gen.II SSDs with several OEM customers, and will also be available through channel partners in Q3 of 2014. The Lightning Gen.II SSD product page can be viewed here; while the SanDisk press release on the Lightning Gen.II SSD family can be viewed in its entirety here.