SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced four new additions to its CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) product family: the CloudSpeed Extreme, CloudSpeed Ultra, CloudSpeed Ascend and CloudSpeed Eco Solid State Drives (SSDs).

The new CloudSpeed SSDs are designed to deliver business-critical performance for the mixed-use, read and write-intensive application workloads that have become increasingly prominent in today's enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments. By combining its flash management Guardian Technology Platform with industry-leading memory technology, SanDisk becomes the first vendor to ship 10 full drive writes per day (DWPD), 19 nm-based enterprise SATA SSDs. The CloudSpeed products thus provide customers with longer-lasting drive operation at a better value. The announcement was made at the Interop and Cloud Connect IT Conference and Expo taking place March 31-April 3 in Las Vegas, Nevada."Organizations in every industry are turning to SSDs to meet the challenges faced by growing volumes of data," said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "However, finding a solution that meets the performance and cost needs of your individual environment can be difficult. The CloudSpeed SATA SSD product family was designed to meet the needs of applications across the read-write spectrum, meaning organizations and server designers no longer need to make tradeoffs between system performance and cost."

An estimated 90 percent of the world's data has been generated within the last two years, effectively catapulting the enterprise into the era of 'Big Data'. Traditional hard disk drive-based data centers are struggling to keep up with increasing performance demands because they lack the throughput, consume a lot of power, and are not as reliable as solid state drives. As a result, organizations are searching for new ways to structure their data centers in order to quickly manipulate and analyze large pools of information and drive better business decisions.

"We are only at the early stages of becoming a data-driven society that wants instantaneous access to our information," said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director, at IDC. "To deliver real-time or near real-time insight to drive business decisions, organizations worldwide will need to consider high performance storage solutions, such as SSDs, thereby driving demand for these solutions in the coming years."

The new CloudSpeed SATA SSDs provide the necessary performance and reliability to meet the demands of various enterprise application workloads-such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), Analytics, High Performance Computing (HPC), Web 2.0 Content Repositories and Media Streaming. This enables enterprise IT organizations and system vendors to simplify design efforts when developing data center systems for multiple applications.

The SanDisk CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) product family offers the following range of endurance and performance capabilities:

• CloudSpeed Extreme - This high-endurance SSD achieves up to 10 full capacity DWPD with a 5 year warranty and delivers up to 75K/25K IOPS of random read/write performance for write-intensive application workloads such as Database Logging and High Performance Computing (HPC). It comes in capacities ranging from 100 GB to 800 GB and supports up to 14.6 Petabytes Written (PBW) to the drive over its life.
• CloudSpeed Ultra - This high-performance drive achieves up to 3 full DWPD with a 5 year warranty and is optimized for mixed-use application workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Financial Transactions, Email/Messaging, E-Commerce, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Collaboration. The CloudSpeed Ultra is offered in capacities ranging from 200 GB to 800 GB, and delivers up to 80K/25K random read/write IOPS and supports up to 4.4 PBW.
• CloudSpeed Ascend - This high-end drive is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as File Servers, Web-based Applications and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL). The CloudSpeed Ascend comes in capacities ranging from 240 GB to 960 GB, achieves up to 1 full DWPD with a 5 year warranty, delivers up to 80K/15K IOPS and supports up to 1.8 PBW.
• CloudSpeed Eco - This entry-level SSD is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as Web Servers, Web 2.0 Content Repositories, Photo Sharing, Media Streaming, Video on Demand (VOD) and Cloud Computing. The CloudSpeed Eco comes in capacities from 240 GB to 960 GB, achieves up to 1 full DWPD with a 3 year warranty, delivers up to 450/400 MB/s of sustained read/write performance and 80k/15k read/write IOPS and supports up to 1.0PBW.

SanDisk's proprietary Guardian Technology Platform, comprised of FlashGuard, DataGuard and EverGuard technologies, work in concert to provide the data protection and endurance suitable for demanding cloud and enterprise data center applications. The CloudSpeed family of SSDs also offers customers the highest reliability and industry-leading data integrity by employing a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, thermal monitoring, and data fail recovery of up to 1 NAND flash erase block. Additionally, SanDisk manufactures its own NAND and has direct control over the design, controller firmware, assembly, testing and supply chain, which delivers innovative products, enterprise-grade quality control and supply assurance.

The new CloudSpeed SSDs have begun sampling with select customers and will be available through channel partners in mid-Q2 2014.