Wednesday, April 30th 2014
SanDisk Also Announces World's First 4 TB Enterprise SAS SSD
SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the Optimus MAX Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD), the industry's first 4 TB SAS SSD. The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that far outpaces today's highest-capacity 2.5" 10K and 15K rpm SAS hard-disk drives (HDDs), making it the first true replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs. Most notably, the Optimus MAX SSD delivers SAS performance and functionality at a breakthrough price point that was previously only available in SATA-based SSDs.
The Optimus MAX SSD tops the newly refreshed Optimus SAS SSD family and also joins the company's newly announced Lightning Gen. II 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs, extending SanDisk's entire SAS portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of a wide array of enterprise applications.
"Customers have been looking for a way to transition their data centers from HDDs to NAND flash, but have been forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality," said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "The Optimus MAX eliminates the need for compromises. We believe that the Optimus MAX will be a disruptive force within the storage industry, catalyzing many organizations to make the switch from their HDD-prominent data center infrastructures to SSDs."
Historically companies have relied on 10K and 15K rpm SAS HDDs for mission-critical applications because they provided relatively high performance at a low cost. However, as data volumes increase and real-time access to information becomes more critical, companies are finding that traditional HDDs can't meet application demands. The Optimus MAX SSD offers an alternative - delivering cost effective, high-density storage with SSD-class performance, allowing enterprises to replace under-performing HDDs while leveraging their current SAS storage infrastructures. With the Optimus MAX SSD, customers experience significant cost savings in infrastructure expenses (i.e., fewer racks, power supplies, HBAs, etc.), resulting in a lower capital acquisition cost, dramatically lower power and footprint requirements, and even greater cost reductions that are realized in TCO.
"Currently, SSDs are used to accentuate high-capacity HDDs in traditional enterprise, cloud and hyperscale data centers, however, increasing numbers of IT managers are finding that they need accelerated performance," said Laura DuBois, Program Vice President for IDC's Storage practice. "As SSDs, such as SanDisk's new Optimus MAX, continue to increase in capacity while achieving greater cost-effectiveness, more enterprises will look to SSDs to replace their legacy HDD infrastructures in order to meet today's high I/O applications and enterprise workload requirements."
As with all SanDisk Optimus drives, the Optimus MAX SSD includes the company's proprietary Guardian Technology Platform, comprised of FlashGuard, DataGuard and EverGuard technologies that work in concert to provide a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, and data fail recovery from lower cost MLC flash. The Optimus MAX SSD also offers customers the performance, uptime and longevity suitable for read-intensive enterprise workloads.
Along with today's introduction of the Optimus MAX SSD, SanDisk also announced that it updated its entire Optimus product family to take advantage of 19 nm MLC NAND flash in order to increase drive performance, as well as renaming the previous Optimus and Optimus Ultra+ SSDs as the Optimus Ascend and Optimus Extreme SSDs, respectively. Tracking to each drives' endurance capabilities, the new Optimus SSD product family includes:
The Optimus MAX SSD and renewed Optimus family of drives will be available with TCG Enterprise Security Subsystem Class compliance to select OEMs and through the channel in Q3-2014.
The Optimus MAX SSD tops the newly refreshed Optimus SAS SSD family and also joins the company's newly announced Lightning Gen. II 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs, extending SanDisk's entire SAS portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of a wide array of enterprise applications.
Historically companies have relied on 10K and 15K rpm SAS HDDs for mission-critical applications because they provided relatively high performance at a low cost. However, as data volumes increase and real-time access to information becomes more critical, companies are finding that traditional HDDs can't meet application demands. The Optimus MAX SSD offers an alternative - delivering cost effective, high-density storage with SSD-class performance, allowing enterprises to replace under-performing HDDs while leveraging their current SAS storage infrastructures. With the Optimus MAX SSD, customers experience significant cost savings in infrastructure expenses (i.e., fewer racks, power supplies, HBAs, etc.), resulting in a lower capital acquisition cost, dramatically lower power and footprint requirements, and even greater cost reductions that are realized in TCO.
"Currently, SSDs are used to accentuate high-capacity HDDs in traditional enterprise, cloud and hyperscale data centers, however, increasing numbers of IT managers are finding that they need accelerated performance," said Laura DuBois, Program Vice President for IDC's Storage practice. "As SSDs, such as SanDisk's new Optimus MAX, continue to increase in capacity while achieving greater cost-effectiveness, more enterprises will look to SSDs to replace their legacy HDD infrastructures in order to meet today's high I/O applications and enterprise workload requirements."
As with all SanDisk Optimus drives, the Optimus MAX SSD includes the company's proprietary Guardian Technology Platform, comprised of FlashGuard, DataGuard and EverGuard technologies that work in concert to provide a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, and data fail recovery from lower cost MLC flash. The Optimus MAX SSD also offers customers the performance, uptime and longevity suitable for read-intensive enterprise workloads.
Along with today's introduction of the Optimus MAX SSD, SanDisk also announced that it updated its entire Optimus product family to take advantage of 19 nm MLC NAND flash in order to increase drive performance, as well as renaming the previous Optimus and Optimus Ultra+ SSDs as the Optimus Ascend and Optimus Extreme SSDs, respectively. Tracking to each drives' endurance capabilities, the new Optimus SSD product family includes:
- Optimus MAX SSD (1-3 full DWPD)
- Optimus Eco SSDs (1-3 full DWPD)
- Optimus Ascend SSDs (10 full DWPD)
- Optimus Ultra SSDs (25 full DWPD), and
- Optimus Extreme SSDs (45 full DWPD)
The Optimus MAX SSD and renewed Optimus family of drives will be available with TCG Enterprise Security Subsystem Class compliance to select OEMs and through the channel in Q3-2014.
12 Comments on SanDisk Also Announces World's First 4 TB Enterprise SAS SSD
Sorry but very light on actual technical information!
It's possible that whatever technology they're using to reach this density isn't 100% ready for prime time and the drives don't make it though their warranties but SanDisk has a solid reputation and I wouldn't expect them to be announcing these if they didn't fully believe that they were ready.
Their goal for enterprise drives is a 0.5% failure rate or better. They're currently around 0.1% failure rates.
To put that in perspective, BackBlaze published some information on hard drive failure rates. The average for mechanical drives was around 4.5%. Their BEST drives had an annual failure rate of 0.9%.
If you want more information about the reliability of Solid States here's another Tech Report article: techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb
They're using cheap consumer drives and just torturing them with constant writes.
The unreliability of solid state disks is a myth. They are consistently more reliable than rotational media, usually more than an order of magnitude more reliable.