Two 6Gb SATA SSDs From Smart Storage Systems

SMART Storage Systems, Inc. has extended its CloudSpeed product line with the introduction of two new drives, the CloudSpeed 1000 and CloudSpeed 1000E.

While leveraging cost-effective 19nm consumer-grade MLC Flash and enhancing its base endurance with SMART Storage Systems Guardian Technology Platform, the CloudSpeed SSDs deliver up to 5x better endurance than competing MLC-based SSDs, resulting in the lowest cost per terabyte written (TBW) in the industry. This enables enterprise customers to better control their storage TCO.

"By 2017, SSD prices will fall 35% annually, but the reliability of the flash used will decline nearly 30%," according to a recent Gartner conference presentation (Gartner Data Center Conference Presentation, Understanding Application Workloads Is Understanding SSDs, Joseph Unsworth, December 3 – 6, 2012.)

The anticipated drop in flash reliability poses as a significant challenge in the enterprise market as SSD manufacturers further leverage MLC flash to meet cost reduction goals, while real-time applications and cloud computing services increase the amount of data being written to drives. Until today, data center managers frequently deployed SSDs leveraging consumer-grade MLC flash to provide the performance required at a low price-per-gigabyte. However, SSDs that leverage standard, non-endurance enhanced consumer-grade MLC flash wear-out quickly in enterprise environments. This results in storage TCO skyrocketing as organizations need to replace SSDs multiple times during the warranty period.

"Our CloudSpeed product line gives OEMs and enterprise organizations the best of both worlds; a low acquisition cost and high endurance. This combination results in the absolute lowest TCO over a five year period," stated John Scaramuzzo, president at SMART Storage Systems.

Leveraging the Guardian Technology Platform, a proprietary suite of enterprise features and enterprise endurance enhancement technologies, the new SSDs deliver endurance from 19nm consumer-grade MLC flash, reaching 3,070TBW and 7,680TBW respectively. This allows organizations to extend the working life of their storage and avoid the need to constantly rip-and-replace SSDs.

The SSDs utilize a 6Gb SATA interface to deliver up to 500/450MB/s sustained read/write performance and up to 80K/35K random IOPS using the test methodology defined by the Storage Networking Industry Alliance’s Solid State Storage Enterprise Test Specification, with consistent performance throughout the five year warranty.

In addition, they come equipped with a line of enterprise features, including SMART Storage Systems’ third generation backup power circuit technology, full data path protection, data fail recovery, thermal monitoring and AES 256-bit encryption. The CloudSpeed 1000 is available in capacities ranging from 120 – 960GB, while the extended endurance CloudSpeed 1000E is available in capacities from 100 – 800GB.

They will begin sampling to select customers at the end of Q1 2013.