SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the Lightning Gen. II family of enterprise-class 12 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drives (SSDs). The Lightning Gen. II 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs, together with the newly announced Optimus MAX 4 TB SAS SSD and updated Optimus SSD product family, help businesses meet the performance, uptime and capacity requirements across the wide range of mixed-use, read- and write-intensive application workloads common in today's data centers.

"Business data needs are becoming so performance-intensive that even applications that are already using SSDs need an additional boost," said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "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."The new Lightning Gen. II SSD product family doubles interface speeds over previously available 6 Gb/s SSDs, providing the highest performance possible for mission-critical and virtualized data center application workloads. Additionally, the Lightning Gen. II family of drives has a feature-rich, robust design that provides powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, instant secure erase, thermal monitoring, and die fail recovery. Lightning Gen. II SSDs deliver industry-leading predictable performance, superior reliability and maximum value with a five-year warranty.

"SanDisk's Lightning Gen. II SAS SSDs offer great performance, uptime and capacity for customers with high-intensity business applications," said Travis Karr, vice president and general manager of PMC's Enterprise Storage Division. "By combining our industry-leading 12 Gb/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 Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSD product family offers the following range of performance and endurance capabilities:

• Lightning Ultra Gen. II SSD - This high-endurance SSD achieves up to 25 full capacity drive writes per day (DWPD) with a five-year warranty and delivers up to 190K/100K IOPS of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/600 MB/s for write-intensive application workloads, such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and Database Logging. It is available in capacities ranging from 200 GB to 800 GB.
• Lightning Ascend Gen. II SSD - Designed for mixed-use application workloads such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Exchange and File Servers, On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and E-Commerce, this high-performance drive delivers up to 190K/80K IOPS of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/600 MB/s. This SSD achieves up to 10 full capacity DWPD with a five-year warranty. It is available in capacities ranging from 200 GB to 1.6 TB.
• Lightning Eco Gen. II SSD - This entry-level SSD is designed for read-intensive application workloads that require high-performance, such as Data Warehousing, Media Streaming, Video on Demand (VOD) and Cloud Computing. It is available in capacities of 1 TB and 1.6 TB and delivers up to 180K/35K IOPS of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/500 MB/s. The Lightning Eco Gen. II SSD delivers up to 3 full capacity DWPD with a five-year warranty.

The Lightning Gen. II 12 Gb/s SAS SSD product family will be available for sampling with select OEM customers and through the channel in the third quarter of 2014.