Virident Brings Out FlashMAX II PCIe SSD

Virident Systems, Inc. announced the FlashMAX II, the second generation of Virident’s PCIe SSDs for enterprise environments.

FlashMAX II features capacity in a low-profile form factor, unconditional performance and twice the performance density as the nearest competition. It also features support for VMware ESXi and VDI environments for performance of virtualized desktops and applications.

"As a satisfied customer of the first-generation FlashMAX, we are thrilled with the impressive performance of FlashMAX II," said Tom Parker, director of information technology at KAYAK Software Corp. "FlashMAX II will support our plans to scale our data center and improve application and virtualization performance for the next generation of our IT operations."

"IT organizations require predictable, sustained and unconditional performance at all capacity levels for enterprise-grade solid-state drives to deliver the best possible service-level agreements and application performance to their users," said Joseph Unsworth, research VP, Gartner. "Reducing power consumption, server sprawl, and enabling a cost-effective upgrade to existing infrastructure performance are also considerations driving IT organizations to increasingly deploy PCIe flash solutions."

Virident’s approach to solving application performance problems incorporates specialized low-profile PCIe hardware and vFAS software that combine to implement SCM within the server. SCM architecture has been designed to integrate flash media, hardware and software to deliver memory-class performance with storage-class capacity and persistence. FlashMAX devices are available in SLC and MLC and range in capacity from 550GB to 2.2TBs.

Features:

• Highest application performance in the industry
• Sustained, predictable and consistent levels of performance are achieved across a range of applications and workloads at all capacity utilization levels
• Twice the performance density of the nearest competitor
• Streaming read performance is twice that of a low-profile SSD from the nearest competitor
• Highest capacity in the industry
• FlashMAX II can deliver 2.2TB of capacity in a low-profile form factor
• Support for VMware ESXi server virtualization and VDI environments
• Plug and play takes only 25 minutes from time to install to ready
• Alleviates the severe I/O bottlenecks caused by boot storms and login storms
• Achieves higher virtual-machine density than traditional storage for both server virtualization and VDI infrastructure
• Cost per desktop is lower than that of traditional storage environments
• Flash-aware RAID for enhanced reliability and data availability
• The flash modules on a card are spread across RAID groups, allowing for multiple failures to occur without disrupting an application’s access to the data
• Simplified management
• Unlike competing solutions, 100% of the capacity available on a FlashMAX II card is available as a single host volume on the server, without having to leverage third-party software RAID products to stripe across multiple drives
• Global and local wear leveling
• To maximize the lifetime of the flash media, FlashMAX II with vFAS software relocates data to areas of flash that are less used whenever needed

"With FlashMAX II, Virident is helping today’s enterprise IT organizations meet one of their most important and difficult storage challenges: delivering application performance in a cost-effective manner," said Shridar Subramanian, VP, product marketing, Virident. "IT organizations can now realize unprecedented gains in terms of unconditional application performance, server consolidation, and simplified setup and management in Linux, Windows and virtualized environments."

Pricing and availability
Virident FlashMAX II pricing starts at $6,000. The product will be available in September, 2012.