HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced the launch of its new FlashMAX III family of PCIe accelerators, which deliver a dramatic improvement in price/performance for today's most demanding database and cloud workloads. Also introduced today is the new HGST ServerCache software that allows IT administrators to inject acceleration into their existing storage infrastructure by quickly and easily deploying a hybrid flash environment with any SSD.

"For businesses to remain competitive, application performance matters. Data needs to be instantly accessible for real-time processing, analytics and insights," said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing, HGST. "To address this need, enterprise customers are actively looking to add flash into their storage infrastructure. Whether focused on peak application acceleration with an all-SSD environment, improving lagging performance by tiering or using caching to leverage combined HDD and flash environments, our new hardware and software solutions help strike that balance among performance, complexity and cost."

HGST's new FlashMAX III PCIe SSD and ServerCache software are suited for performance-intensive applications including databases, SQL servers, data warehouses, big data deployment and video post-production applications. Each address distinct needs for flash storage solutions based on performance, capacity, cost and deployment time requirements.

Key benefits of FlashMAX III PCIe accelerators include:

• New levels of application performance - Built for extreme application performance, FlashMAX III delivers up to 540,000 Random Read IOPS (4K) and up to 200,000 Mixed Sustained Random IOPS (70:30 R:W) from a single half-height, half-length PCIe SSD.
• Dramatic improvements in price/performance - With up to double the price/performance, FlashMAX III offers new levels of value over its prior generation.
• Support for the latest generation of servers - FlashMAX III supports PCI Express 3.0, the latest version of the PCI Express interconnect supported by today's newest server platforms.

Key benefits of ServerCache server software include:

• Increased storage I/O performance - Eliminates storage bottlenecks by creating an SSD cache of the most frequently used data with up to a 10x improvement in performance utilizing any SSD.
• Low cost adoption and simplicity - Delivers high performance with fewer SSDs, with little ongoing monitoring or expense, and absolutely no changes to existing storage infrastructure, applications and backup systems.
• Compatible with a large variety of block-based storage - Runs on any server application hosted on either a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Direct Attached Storage (DAS) system running Windows Server or Linux.

Driven by accelerated customer demand, and backed by customer endorsed, field-proven technologies as well as HGST's commitment to quality, the new FlashMAX III PCIe SSD delivers leading enterprise-class specifications such as 2M hours MTBF and includes a five-year limited warranty. Along with ServerCache, this product family continues to broaden HGST's flash portfolio.

FlashMAX III will be available in Q3 2014, and is currently being qualified by select OEMs. ServerCache is available now for a free 30-day live trial download and for purchase at $995 per physical server.