SanDisk Delivers Increased Performance for Mission-Critical Applications With Lightning Gen. II SSD Product Family

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the Lightning® Gen. II family of enterprise-class 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drives (SSDs). The Lightning Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, together with the newly announced Optimus MAX™ 4TB¹ SAS SSD and updated Optimus® SSD product family, help businesses meet the performance, uptime and capacity requirements across the wide range of mixed-use, read- and write-intensive application workloads common in today’s data centers.

SanDisk Lightning Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSD Product Family (Photo: Business Wire)

“Business data needs are becoming so performance-intensive that even applications that are already using SSDs need an additional boost,” said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The Lightning Gen. II SAS SSDs deliver double the throughput to each slot, empowering organizations to quickly and easily scale their performance infrastructure to meet this growing need.”

The new Lightning Gen. II SSD product family doubles interface speeds over previously available 6Gb/s SSDs, providing the highest performance possible for mission-critical and virtualized data center application workloads. Additionally, the Lightning Gen. II family of drives has a feature-rich, robust design that provides powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, instant secure erase, thermal monitoring, and die fail recovery. Lightning Gen. II SSDs deliver industry-leading predictable performance, superior reliability and maximum value with a five-year warranty².

“SanDisk’s Lightning Gen. II SAS SSDs offer great performance, uptime and capacity for customers with high-intensity business applications,” said Travis Karr, vice president and general manager of PMC’s Enterprise Storage Division. “By combining our industry-leading 12Gb/s SAS Series 8 adapters, I/O controllers and expander products with SanDisk SSDs, our customers can deliver solutions that scale to keep pace with the exponential information growth in today’s data centers at the lowest cost and power possible.”

The Lightning Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSD product family offers the following range of performance and endurance capabilities:

• Lightning Ultra™ Gen. II SSD – This high-endurance SSD achieves up to 25 full capacity drive writes per day (DWPD) with a five-year warranty² and delivers up to 190K/100K IOPS* of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/600 MB/s³ for write-intensive application workloads, such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and Database Logging. It is available in capacities ranging from 200GB to 800GB¹.
• Lightning Ascend™ Gen. II SSD – Designed for mixed-use application workloads such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Exchange and File Servers, On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and E-Commerce, this high-performance drive delivers up to 190K/80K IOPS* of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/600 MB/s³. This SSD achieves up to 10 full capacity DWPD with a five-year warranty². It is available in capacities ranging from 200GB to 1.6TB¹.
• Lightning Eco™ Gen. II SSD – This entry-level SSD is designed for read-intensive application workloads that require high-performance, such as Data Warehousing, Media Streaming, Video on Demand (VOD) and Cloud Computing. It is available in capacities of 1TB and 1.6TB¹ and delivers up to 180K/35K IOPS* of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/500 MB/s³. The Lightning Eco™ Gen. II SSD delivers up to 3 full capacity DWPD with a five-year warranty².

The Lightning Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSD product family will be available for sampling with select OEM customers and through the channel in the third quarter of 2014. For more information about the Lightning Gen. II SSD product family or the rest of SanDisk’s SAS product portfolio, please visit www.sandisk.com/enterprise or view the following YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSyAFQdrjw4&feature=youtu.be.

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 smartphones, tablets and PCs. SanDisk’s consumer products are available at hundreds of thousands of retail stores worldwide. For more information, visit www.sandisk.com.

* Performance may vary by capacity.

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

² The earlier of (I) five (5) years or (II) the time at which such product unit’s total cumulative data recorded on such unit at its S.M.A.R.T. attribute (log page 2Fh, parameter 25) or log page 11h, parameter 1 (Percentage Used Endurance Indicator) reaches 100% of the product units’ endurance value. For more warranty information, please visit kb.sandisk.com.

³ Up to stated speed. Based on internal testing; performance may vary based on host device. 1 megabyte (MB) = 1 million bytes. X=150KB/s.

(C) 2014 SanDisk Corporation. All rights reserved. SanDisk is a trademark of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. Lightning and Optimus are trademarks of SanDisk Enterprise IP LLC., registered in the United States and other countries. Optimus MAX, Lightning Eco, Lightning Ascend and Lightning Ultra 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.

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