August 19, 2015, Seoul – SanDisk, a global leader in flash storage solutions, has launched the CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II SATA SSD, specialized for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Software Defined Storage (SDS). The Gen. II CloudSpeed Ultra™ SATA SSD offers capacities of up to 1.6 terabytes (TB) and provides storage performance and capacity optimized for high-speed processing and complex transaction workloads, such as e-commerce and online collaboration services. Expanding SanDisk’s cloud-centric flash solution portfolio, the Gen. II CloudSpeed Ultra™ offers the best value for money with an IOPS of $0.04, a significant improvement over the $3.50 of existing SATA HDDs. In addition, the second generation CloudSpeed Ultra not only provides 99% Quality of Service (QoS) with 80 microseconds of random read/write latency, but also delivers up to 32,000 4K write IOPS[1] with a processing speed of 530 MB per second.

John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk, pointed out, “Transaction-oriented applications are a significant burden for customers of cloud service providers, making it difficult to build high-performance data center platforms with low infrastructure costs.” He added, “SanDisk has introduced the second generation CloudSpeed Ultra to further enhance customer service levels, enabling telecommunications service providers and software-defined storage vendors to not only provide a superior customer experience but also significantly reduce server and software licensing costs, as well as overhead management costs, required to support transaction and analytics databases.”

According to a recently published Forrester Research report, corporate executives are demanding next-generation applications and new insights for smarter customer relationships and faster decision-making. To meet these requirements, enterprise solution architects need to design agile technical architectures that can automatically scale to suit functionality, such as databases that support new initiatives[2]. To meet service level agreements, telecommunications service providers are implementing resilient cloud infrastructure that utilizes large volumes of SSDs in computer clusters, even during high workloads, to handle low latency, high-performance NoSQL analytics, online transaction processing, and collaborative applications. To handle the complex workloads arising in such large-scale XaaS (all IT products and services provided as a service) environments, cost per storage capacity (i.e., cost per gigabyte) can no longer serve as a standard for evaluating IT infrastructure costs when compared to IOPS costs.

In the past, telecommunications service providers consolidated HDDs using caching mechanisms to prepare for transactions and intensive I/O usage. However, this approach requires significant effort and work to maintain a high-performance tier within the IT infrastructure, resulting in a heavy burden of management costs. To meet the performance requirements of recently developed cloud applications, massive numbers of HDDs must be elastically combined with high-cost performance enhancement schemes, leading to the inefficient use and operation of data center space and resources. Designed with value and performance in mind, the 2nd Generation CloudSpeed Ultra™ enables elastic cloud configurations to meet cloud capacity needs without server expansion, delivering superior cost-effectiveness and best-in-class workload performance with virtually no latency.

Like SanDisk's existing CloudSpeed™ SSDs, the 2nd generation CloudSpeed Ultra SSD is equipped with SanDisk's innovative Guardian Technology™ Platform and provides powerful error correction and detection technologies, along with full data path protection and data error recovery capabilities. In addition, the 2nd generation CloudSpeed Ultra™ SSD comes with a 5-year limited warranty.

The 2nd Generation CloudSpeed Ultra™ SSD will be available through the Enterprise Channel Partner Program starting in August and will be selectively provided to telecommunications service providers and software-defined storage vendors. For more information on the 2nd Generation CloudSpeed Ultra, please visit www.sandisk.com/enterprise/sata-ssd/, watch the 2nd Generation CloudSpeed Ultra video, or check the SanDisk corporate blog. For further inquiries regarding purchasing, please contact SanDisk Korea (Main number: 02-6718-4600).