Virident (WD) at 4.8TB for Low Profile PCIe SSD

Virident Systems, Inc. announced that it is breaking the capacity barrier for low-profile PCIe flash cards.

The low-profile form factor 4.8TB FlashMAX Capacity card pushes the limits of usable capacity in a single device and will drive new levels of consolidation of the data center, making it for web-scale and other environments requiring the maximum usable capacity. It is more than doubling the density of its existing FlashMAX II, along with the combination of its FlashMAX Connect software suite.

“Flash has firmly entrenched itself as the storage of choice for the increasingly demanding workloads being seen in the enterprise,” said Jason Walker, senior network architect, IPFS Corporation. “However, until now the relatively limited capacity of PCIe flash cards has made it less efficient for capacity storage FlashMAX Capacity’s 4.8TB of flash storage matches the capacity of a traditional HDD drive and doesn’t require managing and integrating multiple tiers of storage. The combined capacity and performance Virident will provide is a big step forward for the storage industry, supporting the acceptance of, and move to, an all-silicon data center.”

Virident has combined the same features found in its FlashMAX II card, such as sustainable and predictable performance and flash-aware RAID, with the ability to present a single 4.8 TB device to applications. With the capacity of disk and the performance of flash, it provides CAPEX and OPEX benefits, making it for demanding applications.

The 4.8 TB FlashMAX Capacity model will be available in the second half of Q4 2013.

“Resistance is a common reaction to change, and that’s where the storage industry is right now,” said Ken Grohe, VP of WW customer operations, Virident. “There’s still a level of resistance to flash because it’s unfamiliar and its best use cases are not completely understood. The ability to make flash look and feel like a SAN is key to moving the industry forward, and Virident is dedicated to leading the flash platform transformation in the data center. The new capacity offered by FlashMAX Capacity, combined with the caching, sharing and HA of FlashMAX Connect, takes the industry one step closer to achieving the performance of flash with the advantages of an enterprise SAN.”

FlashMAX Connect Suite extends the FlashMAX family of products and functionality with the following features:

• HA: vHA enables high-performance/low-latency synchronous replication that copies writes from one server to another, providing storage node or sever failover without affecting application and data availability.
• Shared Storage Management: vShare enables access to flash-aware partitions of a remote PCIe flash. This allows customers to share the storage residing on remote servers and thereby scale PCIe flash capacity independently of compute. The result is flexibility and shareability, so a single PCIe flash card can service multiple servers depending on the needs of the application.
• Data Management: vCache enables construction of transparent-performance cache devices that include write-back, write-through and write-around cache and thus deliver performance and endurance. By adding a FlashMAX II device and vCache to the infrastructure customers can get the performance of a PCIe flash while leveraging existing SAN/NAS investments.