SanDisk Tackles Increasing Data Center Application Demands with Release of Four New Enterprise SATA SSDs

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced four new additions to its CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) product family: the CloudSpeed Extreme™, CloudSpeed Ultra™, CloudSpeed Ascend™ and CloudSpeed Eco™ Solid State Drives (SSDs). The new CloudSpeed SSDs are designed to deliver business-critical performance for the mixed-use, read and write-intensive application workloads that have become increasingly prominent in today’s enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments. By combining its flash management Guardian Technology^TM Platform with industry-leading memory technology, SanDisk becomes the first vendor to ship 10 full drive writes per day (DWPD)¹, 19nm-based enterprise SATA SSDs. The CloudSpeed products thus provide customers with longer-lasting drive operation at a better value. The announcement was made at the Interop and Cloud Connect IT Conference and Expo taking place March 31-April 3 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The CloudSpeed SATA SSD product family is designed to deliver business-critical performance for mixed-use, read and write-intensive application workloads prominent in today's enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments. (Photo: Business Wire)

“Organizations in every industry are turning to SSDs to meet the challenges faced by growing volumes of data,” said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “However, finding a solution that meets the performance and cost needs of your individual environment can be difficult. The CloudSpeed SATA SSD product family was designed to meet the needs of applications across the read-write spectrum, meaning organizations and server designers no longer need to make tradeoffs between system performance and cost.”

An estimated 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated within the last two years², effectively catapulting the enterprise into the era of ‘Big Data’. Traditional hard disk drive-based data centers are struggling to keep up with increasing performance demands because they lack the throughput, consume a lot of power, and are not as reliable as solid state drives. As a result, organizations are searching for new ways to structure their data centers in order to quickly manipulate and analyze large pools of information and drive better business decisions.

"We are only at the early stages of becoming a data-driven society that wants instantaneous access to our information,” said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director, at IDC. “To deliver real-time or near real-time insight to drive business decisions, organizations worldwide will need to consider high performance storage solutions, such as SSDs, thereby driving demand for these solutions in the coming years.”

The new CloudSpeed SATA SSDs provide the necessary performance and reliability to meet the demands of various enterprise application workloads—such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), Analytics, High Performance Computing (HPC), Web 2.0 Content Repositories and Media Streaming. This enables enterprise IT organizations and system vendors to simplify design efforts when developing data center systems for multiple applications.

The SanDisk CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) product family offers the following range of endurance and performance capabilities:

• CloudSpeed Extreme—This high-endurance SSD achieves up to 10 full capacity DWPD with a 5 year warranty¹ and delivers up to 75K/25K IOPS of random read/write performance for write-intensive application workloads such as Database Logging and High Performance Computing (HPC). It comes in capacities ranging from 100GB to 800GB and supports up to 14.6 Petabytes Written (PBW) to the drive over its life.
• CloudSpeed Ultra—This high-performance drive achieves up to 3 full DWPD with a 5 year warranty¹ and is optimized for mixed-use application workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Financial Transactions, Email/Messaging, E-Commerce, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Collaboration. The CloudSpeed Ultra is offered in capacities ranging from 200GB to 800GB, and delivers up to 80K/25K random read/write IOPS and supports up to 4.4 PBW.
• CloudSpeed Ascend—This high-end drive is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as File Servers, Web-based Applications and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL). The CloudSpeed Ascend comes in capacities ranging from 240GB to 960GB, achieves up to 1 full DWPD with a 5 year warranty¹, delivers up to 80K/15K IOPS and supports up to 1.8 PBW.
• CloudSpeed Eco—This entry-level SSD is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as Web Servers, Web 2.0 Content Repositories, Photo Sharing, Media Streaming, Video on Demand (VOD) and Cloud Computing. The CloudSpeed Eco comes in capacities from 240GB to 960GB, achieves up to 1 full DWPD with a 3 year warranty⁴³, delivers up to 450/400 MB/s** of sustained read/write performance and 80k/15k read/write IOPS and supports up to 1.0PBW.

SanDisk’s proprietary Guardian Technology™ Platform, comprised of FlashGuard™, DataGuard™ and EverGuard™ technologies, work in concert to provide the data protection and endurance suitable for demanding cloud and enterprise data center applications. The CloudSpeed family of SSDs also offers customers the highest reliability and industry-leading data integrity by employing a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, thermal monitoring, and data fail recovery of up to 1 NAND flash erase block. Additionally, SanDisk manufactures its own NAND and has direct control over the design, controller firmware, assembly, testing and supply chain, which delivers innovative products, enterprise-grade quality control and supply assurance.

The new CloudSpeed SSDs have begun sampling with select customers and will be available through channel partners in mid-Q2 2014. For more information about SanDisk’s CloudSpeed SATA SSDs product family, please visit http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise/sata-ssd or visit booth #1367 on the Interop show floor. Additional insights on the new CloudSpeed SSDs can also be obtained by viewing this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCHGdWTkJPk or visiting the following blog post: http://itblog.sandisk.com/new-cloudspeed-lineup-eliminates-costly-one-size-fits-all-approach-to-storage-infrastructures.

About SanDisk

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, is a global leader in flash storage solutions. For more than 25 years, SanDisk has expanded the possibilities of storage, providing trusted and innovative products that have transformed the electronics industry. Today, SanDisk’s quality, state-of-the-art solutions are at the heart of many of the world's largest data centers, and embedded in advanced smart phones, tablets and PCs. SanDisk’s consumer products are available at hundreds of thousands of retail stores worldwide. For more information, visit www.sandisk.com.

About Interop®

Interop® is the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inform and inspire the world’s IT community. Part of UBM Tech's family of global brands, Interop® drives the adoption of technology, providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success. Through in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations in its unique InteropNet program, Interop provides the forum for the most powerful innovations and solutions the industry has to offer. Interop Las Vegas is the flagship event held each spring, with Interop New York held each fall, with annual international events in Mumbai, London and Tokyo, all produced by UBM Tech and partners. For more information about these events visit www.interop.com.

*1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Actual user capacity less.

**Up to stated speed. Based on internal testing; performance may vary depending upon drive capacity, host device, OS and application.1 megabyte (MB) = 1 million bytes.

© 2014 SanDisk Corporation. All rights reserved. SanDisk is a trademark of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. CloudSpeed, CloudSpeed Eco, CloudSpeed Ascend, CloudSpeed Ultra, CloudSpeed Extreme, Guardian Technology, FlashGuard, DataGuard and EverGuard are trademarks of SanDisk Enterprise IP LLC. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their holder(s).

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including expectations for markets, products and customers that are based on our current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate. Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include among others: the market demand for our products may grow more slowly than our expectations or our products may not be available in the capacities that we expect or perform as expected, or the other risks detailed from time-to-time in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including, but not limited to, our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our annual report on Form 10-K. We do not intend to update the information contained in this press release.

¹ Warranty/DWPD - The lesser of 5 years from the date of manufacture of the product or the date on which the product’s relevant endurance thresholds set forth in the product specifications are reached.
² Source: Science Daily, “Big Data, for better or worse: 90% of world's data generated over last two years,” SINTEF, May 22, 2013.
³ Warranty/DWPD - The lesser of 3 years from the date of manufacture of the product or the date on which the product’s relevant endurance thresholds set forth in the product specifications are reached.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/multimedia/home/20140331005484/en/