SanDisk and IBM Collaborate to Deliver Software-Defined All-Flash Storage Solutions

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, and IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced a collaboration to bring out a unique class of next-generation, software-defined, all-flash storage solutions for the data center. At the core of this collaboration are SanDisk’s InfiniFlash™ System—a high-capacity and extreme-performance flash-based software defined storage system featuring IBM Spectrum Scale^TM filesystem from IBM. The joint solution of software-defined all-flash storage addresses the escalating datacenter challenges of scale, performance, agility and break-through economics.

As bi-modal IT, traditional and cloud native applications become social, mobile and real-time, IT groups must address the mounting pressure to deliver best-of-breed storage. The InfiniFlash for IBM Spectrum Scale Solution is a scale-out, ultra-dense system combined with IBM Spectrum Scale and allows private, hybrid and public cloud customers to enable Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) by starting small and growing to multiple petabytes. InfiniFlash delivers best-in-class cost per IOPS/TB and the ability to scale compute and storage independently, while delivering the high reliability and low failure rate of flash, resulting in breakthrough capex and opex savings. The joint flash storage solution will address use cases such as clustered scale-out high performance NAS, Big Data In-Place analytics and OpenStack for files.

SanDisk InfiniFlash

Award-winning SanDisk InfiniFlash is a next-generation storage platform created by SanDisk offering 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80 percent less power than traditional hard disk drive (HDD) based arrays. InfiniFlash also delivers breakthrough pricing for an all-flash solution starting at less than $1 per gigabyte (GB) for an all-flash system before the additional effects of compression or de-duplication technologies are considered. With software stacks that offer data reduction schemes, the effective cost/GB goes down even more significantly to unprecedented levels (example: 20 cents/GB based on a 5X data reduction factor).

IBM Spectrum Scale

Award-winning IBM Spectrum Scale is a software-defined, distributed, parallel filesystem, for high performance, large scale workloads on-premises or in the cloud. Featuring the ability to automatically tier data based on application needs, the Spectrum Scale software-defined storage solution provides file, object, and integrated data analytics for:

• Compute clusters (technical computing)
• Big data and analytics
• Cognitive computing
• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
• Private cloud
• Content repositories

“Our initiative with IBM brings the best of both worlds to data centers: breakthrough economics compared to traditional all-flash array deployments, and dramatically higher performance, improved reliability and lower power consumption compared to hard disk drive-based arrays,” said Ravi Swaminathan, vice president and general manager, System and Software Solutions, SanDisk. “These offerings enable customers to economically deploy flash at petabyte-scale, which drive business growth through new services and offerings for their end-customers.”

“The market-leading combination of IBM Spectrum Scale and SanDisk’s InfiniFlash solution delivers key differentiators for our mutual clients’ applications and workloads,” said Eric Herzog, vice president product marketing and management, of IBM Storage Systems Division. “These solutions will be designed to break new ground and make all-flash storage exceedingly cost-effective for a wide range of use cases, from high-performance databases to virtualized environments to big data oceans to extra-dense active archive repositories and more.”

“Next-Gen applications demand storage services which are high-performance, cost-effective, elastic and agile while providing break-through capex and opex,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Program Director, Enterprise Servers and Storage at IDC. “This joint solution between SanDisk and IBM that combines an all-flash storage array with a software-defined storage software effectively addresses the changing needs of the data center.”

About SanDisk Systems & Storage Solutions

SanDisk’s Systems & Storage Solution portfolio enables the flash-transformed data center through integrated, tested and supported flash solution building blocks for today’s enterprise and cloud workloads, including virtualization, tier-1 databases, Big Data Analytics and Digital Media Repositories, for an experience never before thought possible with extreme performance, massive capacity and immediate access to information.

In addition to InfiniFlash System, the portfolio includes the leading solid state devices of Fusion ioMemory, Lightning Series, Optimus Series and CloudSpeed Series and SanDisk enterprise SSDs and systems integrated with software such as FlashSoft™, ION Accelerator™ and InfiniFlash OS Ceph.

For more information about Data Center Solutions from SanDisk, visit www.sandisk.com/business/datacenter

Learn more about InfiniFlash for IBM Spectrum Scale Solution on the SanDisk IT Blog: http://sndk.co/AllFlashSDS

About IBM Spectrum Storage

IBM’s Spectrum Storage™ portfolio can centrally manage more than 300 different storage devices and yottabytes of data. This device interoperability is the broadest in the industry—incorporating both IBM and non-IBM hardware and tape systems. IBM Spectrum Storage can help reduce storage costs up to 90 percent in certain environments by automatically moving data onto the most economical storage device—either from IBM or non-IBM flash, disk and tape systems.

In addition to Spectrum Scale, the IBM Spectrum Storage portfolio includes key storage software such as Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Accelerate, Spectrum Control, Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Archive.

For more information about software defined storage offerings from IBM, visit www.ibm.com/spectrumstorage.

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 27 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, 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.

SanDisk Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements about the continued collaboration between SanDisk and IBM to work together on all-flash scale-out storage solutions for the data center; growth of all-flash storage systems market; and the functionalities, performance and cost advantages of all-flash storage systems. There are a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate including, among others: the failure of all-flash storage systems to achieve the various functionality, performance and cost benefits currently anticipated; potential delays in product development or lack of customer acceptance of SanDisk’s all-flash storage systems; failure to manage and continue the collaboration with IBM, general business and economic conditions; weakness in demand in all-flash storage systems; industry and technology trends not occurring in the timeline SanDisk anticipates or at all; and the other risks detailed from time-to-time in SanDisk’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 3, 2016. All statements made in this news release are made only as of the date of this release. SanDisk undertakes no obligations to update the information in this release in the event facts or circumstances change after the date of this release.

© 2016 SanDisk Corporation.

All rights reserved. SanDisk and InfiniFlash are trademarks or registered trademarks of SanDisk Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

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