SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced its SanDisk Tech Assist Refresh (STAR) program for the company's X-series line of client SSDs. This innovative service provides corporate CIOs and IT decision makers with a hassle free solution for upgrading their fleet of employee laptops from slower hard disk drives to higher performance, lower power and more reliable SSDs. Through the STAR program, SanDisk relieves IT departments of having to manage all aspects of upgrading corporate laptops such as, endpoint inventory analysis, employee service scheduling, system upgrades, data migration, daily progress reporting, post-upgrade analysis and support.

"At SanDisk we're keenly focused on being a trusted advisor to CIOs and IT decision makers in order to help address their key pain points-security, system reliability, employee productivity, and capex," said Tarun Loomba, vice president of marketing, client storage solutions at SanDisk. "Our X-series portfolio is designed to address these pain points, and now with our STAR program, we can go one step further by relieving CIOs from the cumbersome process of migrating corporate information from existing HDD-based laptops to our highly-reliable, performance enhancing X-series SSDs, and do it for them in a timely, cost-effective manner."

With today's increasingly mobile, 24/7 workforce, the demand for responsive computer applications is quickly expanding, which requires a high-performing, power efficient and reliable laptop. According to a survey conducted by IDC of mobile workers who owned at least one PC or Mac computer, 40 percent of respondents are interested in upgrading a PC within the next 12 months; 97 percent of respondents identify the PC as their primary computing device; and 83 percent believe it's more productive than a smartphone. Often, the bulk of a PC may be working, but over time, due to disk utilization and software updates, the performance degrades to the point where it impedes what employees need it to do. Worse yet, it fails completely, often as a result of a mechanical disk drive failure. Rather than replace the entire device, an upgrade to a high-performance, highly reliable SSD allows companies to supercharge that PC quickly and for a fraction of the cost.

SanDisk's X-series SSDs are the perfect solution to extend the life of a fleet of corporate desktops, laptops, and workstations. With a corporate-wide, tech-assisted refresh, swapping out aging mechanical hard drives for state-of-the art SanDisk SSDs is a seamless, efficient process that has minimal impact on the business. The new STAR program helps CIOs:

• Reduce Cost and Increase Productivity-Replacing legacy HDDs with SSDs can contribute to an annual cost savings of up to $608 per unit through an 18-month PC lifecycle extension, a 35 percent increase in employee productivity, an 86 percent reduction in IT Labor, and a 15x performance boost per system.
• Decrease Risk-Data migration is no simple task. When upgrading a fleet of corporate laptops, CIOs must ensure they can transfer employees' data safely, cost effectively, and with reduced business disruption. The STAR program helps CIOs and IT decision makers (ITDM) confidently and efficiently move data where it needs to go.
• Limit Disruptions-SanDisk's team of skilled specialists and time-tested tools make the process of migrating to an SSD efficient and friction-free, reducing interruptions to business operations and application availability.

"Employee frustration with our current systems was rising and we knew we needed to do something. The STAR program was the perfect fit for us. Not only did it come with SanDisk's brand name, reputation and leadership in the industry, but we were impressed by the fact that SanDisk proposed a complete solution, as opposed to selling a component," said Carlos Gutierrez, vice president, silicon systems and solutions, Lattice Semiconductor. "We didn't have to worry about the environment, the software, the upgrade, the downtime, etc. and we were able to get a 50-60 percent performance boost from the SSDs literally overnight, with very little overhead from our IT team and very little impact on our productivity."