Press Releases

Aug 11, 2015

CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II SSD Powers Elastic Cloud Agility for Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) Environments

Milpitas, Calif., August 11, 2015– SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced its new CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II SATA SSD for cloud service provider (CSP) and software-defined storage (SDS) vendor environments. Offering up to 1.6TB* of usable capacity, CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II SATA SSD provides the storage performance and density needed for mixed-use, latency-sensitive transactional workloads—such as e-commerce and collaborative online services. Expanding on SanDisk’s existing portfolio of cloud-focused flash solutions, CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II delivers unmatched price/performance leadership at a little over $0.04 per IOPS versus $3.50 per IOPS typically inherent with conventional SATA HDDs. Additionally, CloudSpeed Ultra Gen. II serves up to 32,000 4K write IOPS with 530MB/sec throughput¹, and an 80 microseconds random read write latency - delivering 99.9 percent quality of service (QoS).

“The demand of transaction-oriented applications puts tremendous strain on our cloud service provider customers to architect data center platforms capable of delivering high performance, while keeping infrastructure costs in check,” said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions, SanDisk. “As a trusted provider of flash storage solutions, SanDisk understands the critical need for cloud elasticity in order to raise customer service levels. With CloudSpeed Ultra Gen. II, CSPand SDS companies can provide an exceptional customer experience, while reducing administrative overhead along with the number of servers and software licenses needed to support transaction and analytical databases.”

CSPs continually strive to provide top-notch service levels to enable a seamless customer experience. A recent report by Forrester Research asserts that business leaders demand next-generation applications and new insights to drive more intelligent engagement and better decisions. To get there, enterprise architects need to design an agile technical architecture that can scale automatically with capabilities, such as databases, that are always available to support new initiatives². In order to meet service level agreements (SLAs) during peak operations, CSPs often utilize dozens or hundreds of SSDs in compute clusters to enable the elastic cloud infrastructures needed to handle low-latency, high-performing NoSQL analytics, online transaction processing and collaborative applications. For mixed workloads in massive XaaS (Anything(X)-as-a-Service) environments such as these, price based on storage capacity—i.e. dollar per gigabyte—is no longer a defining feature for assessing IT infrastructure costs vs. dollar per IOPS.

Traditionally, CSPs have aggregated HDDs with caching mechanisms to address transactions and I/O intensive use cases. However, doing so has caused them to incur laborious and manual administrative costs to maintain high performing tiers of IT infrastructure. To effectively meet the performance demands of today’s newer cloud applications, exorbitant numbers of HDDs would need to be coupled with elaborate and costly performance enhancement schemes—causing grossly inefficient use of data center space and resources. CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II is designed with value and performance in mind—delivering a compelling price/performance ratio and unparalleled latency-sensitive workload performance for cloud elasticity that meets today’s cloud-capacity needs while avoiding the server sprawl.

As with all CloudSpeed™ SSDs, CloudSpeed Ultra Gen. II SSD includes SanDisk’s innovative Guardian Technology™ Platform, which works to provide a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection and data fail recovery. CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II SSD also comes with a limited five year warranty****.

CloudSpeed Ultra™ Gen. II SSD will be available for select CSP and SDS customers in August and on a staggered channel release through the Enterprise Channel Partner program. For more information about CloudSpeed Ultra Gen. II, visit www.sandisk.com/enterprise/sata-ssd/. Additional insights on the value that CloudSpeed Ultra Gen. II brings to CSPs and SDS vendors can be viewed in this video or read on the SanDisk Enterprise Blog site.

Visit SanDisk at Flash Memory Summit 2015

Visit us in booth #207 to see live demos and interact with SanDisk flash technology experts during Flash Memory Summit 2015 taking place August 11-13 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Hear about the next evolution of flash innovation during our CTO, Kevin Conley’s keynote session, “Flash as the Great Disruptor,” on August 11th at 1:30 PM. Learn how new computing requirements like Big Data, mobile technology and IoT are creating a new frontier for the transformative power of flash storage. More members of SanDisk's team will also be speaking throughout the show. Learn about all of our other sessions by clicking here.

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.

© 2015 SanDisk Corporation. All rights reserved. SanDisk is a trademark of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. CloudSpeed, CloudSpeed Ultra and Guardian Technology are trademarks of SanDisk Corporation. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their holder(s).

¹ Performance results are based on internal testing based on 4KB transfer rate. Results and performance may vary according to configurations and systems, including drive capacity, system architecture, server platform, and applications. Full configuration details and measured results are on record. Specifications are subject to change without notice.

² Forrester Research, “Market Overview: Database-As-A-Service” by Noel Yuhanna, June 25, 2015 | Updated: July 10, 2015.

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

**** 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 threshold set forth in the product specifications are reached.

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including expectations for product capacities, pricing, availability and performance 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: our products may not be available in the capacities or pricing that we expect, when 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. We do not intend to update the information contained in this news release. This news release also contains references and links to third-party websites. SanDisk is not responsible for and cannot control those websites.