SanDisk SSD at 4TB

SanDisk Corporation announced the Optimus MAX SAS SSD, the industry’s first 4TB SAS SSD.

The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that outpaces today’s highest-capacity 2.5″ 10K and 15Krpm SAS HDDs, making a replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs.

It delivers SAS performance and functionality at a price point that was previously only available in SATA-based SSDs. It tops the newly refreshed Optimus SAS SSD family and also joins the company’s newly announced Lightning Gen. II 12Gb SAS SSDs, extending SanDisk’s entire SAS portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of an array of enterprise applications.
 
“Customers have been looking for a way to transition their data centers from HDDs to NAND flash, but have been forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality,” said John Scaramuzzo, SVP and GM, enterprise storage solutions, SanDisk. “The Optimus MAX eliminates the need for compromises. We believe that the Optimus MAX will be a disruptive force within the storage industry, catalyzing many organizations to make the switch from their HDD-prominent data center infrastructures to SSDs.”
 
Historically companies have relied on 10K and 15Krpm SAS HDDs for mission-critical applications because they provided relatively high performance at a low cost. However, as data volumes increase and real-time access to information becomes more critical, companies are finding that traditional HDDs can’t meet application demands. The Optimus MAX SSD offers an alternative-delivering cost effective, high-density storage with SSD-class performance, allowing enterprises to replace under-performing HDDs while leveraging their current SAS storage infrastructures. With the Optimus MAX SSD, customers experience cost savings in infrastructure expenses (i.e., fewer racks, power supplies, HBAs, etc.), resulting in a lower capital acquisition cost, lower power and footprint requirements, and greater cost reductions that are realized in TCO.

“Currently, SSDs are used to accentuate high-capacity HDDs in traditional enterprise, cloud and hyperscale data centers, however, increasing numbers of IT managers are finding that they need accelerated performance,” said Laura DuBois, program VP for IDC’s storage practice. “As SSDs, such as SanDisk’s new Optimus MAX, continue to increase in capacity while achieving greater cost-effectiveness, more enterprises will look to SSDs to replace their legacy HDD infrastructures in order to meet today’s high I/O applications and enterprise workload requirements.“
 
As with all Optimus drives, the Optimus MAX SSD includes the company’s proprietary Guardian Technology Platform, comprised of FlashGuard, DataGuard and EverGuard technologies that work in concert to provide a combination of error correction and detection technology, data path protection, and data fail recovery from lower cost MLC flash. The Optimus MAX SSD also offers customers the performance, uptime and longevity suitable for read-intensive enterprise workloads.

Tracking to each drives’ endurance capabilities,
the new Optimus SSD product family includes:

• Optimus MAX SSD  (1-3 full DWPD)
• Optimus Eco SSDs (1-3 full DWPD)
• Optimus Ascend SSDs (10 full DWPD)
• Optimus Ultra SSDs (25 full DWPD), and
• Optimus Extreme SSDs (45 full DWPD)

With this update, the Optimus SSD product family delivers a single SAS platform that can address a range of enterprise application performance, capacity and endurance requirements.
 
The Optimus MAX SSD and renewed Optimus family of drives will be available with TCG Enterprise Security Subsystem Class compliance to select OEMs and through the channel in Q3 2014.