SanDisk Corp. has expanded its Lightning Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) family with the release of six new 2.5-inch 6GB SAS models.
The new drives include three SLC (single-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 100GB, 200GB and 400GB; and three MLC (multilevel cell) flash drives with capacities of 200GB, 400GB and 800GB.
"With ever-increasing demands being placed on cloud and enterprise IT, our OEM partners require data storage solutions that don't just keep up, but help their customers stay ahead," said Greg Goelz, SanDisk vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions, on the release of the new drives.
SanDisk said the new Lightning 6GB SAS drives have been integrated into HP Qualified storage drives and are available to customers on HP ProLiant servers.
The ProLiant DL380 G7 server is said to be one of the top 10 systems in terms of price and performance by the Transaction Processing Performance Council and is included on the TPC-C list.
According to SanDisk, the 6GB SAS EFDs provide IT managers and OEMs with new levels of system design flexibility.
The SLC- and MLC-based models feature a new Single Firmware Binary technology which SanDisk claims to reduce customer qualification time and speeds time-to-market. These models feature Write Through Logging (WTL) technology, a solution that delivers high performance at low queue depths to avoid volatility that would otherwise require battery back-up or supercapacitors for protection. WTL operation is completely transparent to the host and maintains a predictable performance profile across different workloads, SanDisk decribed.
The release of the six new 6GB SAS drives expands the Lighting family to 11 models, making it the industry's broadest offering of SAS SSD solutions to fit a wide range of solutions, said SanDisk.
SanDisk added that all its Lightning EFDs are based on an advanced controller design and software architecture that delivers dramatic I/O performance and reliability improvements over competing SSD technology and low energy consumption in demanding enterprise computing environments.
The Lightning products are part of the new enterprise storage solutions (ESS) division that SanDisk created following its recent acquisition of Pliant Technology.
The new SanDisk Lightning 6GB SAS models are now being delivered for OEM qualification, and are scheduled to be available in the third quarter.