SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the Optimus MAX Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD), the industry’s first 4TB SAS SSD. The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that far outpaces today’s highest-capacity 2.5” 10K and 15K rpm SAS hard-disk drives (HDDs), making it the first true replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs. Significantly, the Optimus MAX SSD delivers SAS performance and functionality at a breakthrough price point that was previously only available in SATA-based SSDs. The Optimus MAX SSD tops the newly refreshed Optimus® SAS SSD family and also joins the company’s newly announced Lightning® Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, extending SanDisk’s entire SAS portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of a wide array of enterprise applications.
“Customers have been looking for a way to transition their data centers from HDDs to NAND flash, but have been forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality,” said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The Optimus MAX eliminates the need for compromises. We believe that the Optimus MAX will be a disruptive force within the storage industry, catalyzing many organizations to make the switch from their HDD-prominent data center infrastructures to SSDs.”
Historically companies have relied on 10K and 15K rpm SAS HDDs for mission-critical applications because they provided relatively high performance at a low cost. However, as data volumes increase and real-time access to information becomes more critical, companies are finding that traditional HDDs can’t meet application demands. The Optimus MAX SSD offers an alternative—delivering cost effective, high-density storage with SSD-class performance, allowing enterprises to replace under-performing HDDs while leveraging their current SAS storage infrastructures. With the Optimus MAX SSD, customers experience significant cost savings in infrastructure expenses (i.e., fewer racks, power supplies, HBAs, etc.), resulting in a lower capital acquisition cost, dramatically lower power and footprint requirements, and even greater cost reductions that are realized in TCO.
“Currently, SSDs are used to accentuate high-capacity HDDs in traditional enterprise, cloud and hyperscale data centers, however, increasing numbers of IT managers are finding that they need accelerated performance,” said Laura DuBois, Program Vice President for IDC's Storage practice. “As SSDs, such as SanDisk’s new Optimus MAX, continue to increase in capacity while achieving greater cost-effectiveness, more enterprises will look to SSDs to replace their legacy HDD infrastructures in order to meet today’s high I/O applications and enterprise workload requirements.”
As with all SanDisk Optimus drives, the Optimus MAX SSD includes the company’s proprietary Guardian Technology™ Platform, comprised of FlashGuard™, DataGuard™ and EverGuard™ technologies that work in concert to provide a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, and data fail recovery from lower cost MLC flash. The Optimus MAX SSD also offers customers the performance, uptime and longevity suitable for read-intensive enterprise workloads.
Along with today’s introduction of the Optimus MAX SSD, SanDisk also announced that it updated its entire Optimus product family to take advantage of 19nm MLC NAND flash in order to increase drive performance, as well as renaming the previous Optimus® and Optimus® Ultra+ SSDs as the Optimus Ascend™ and Optimus Extreme™ SSDs, respectively. Tracking to each drives’ endurance capabilities, the new Optimus SSD product family includes:
- Optimus MAX™ SSD (1-3 full DWPD)
- Optimus Eco™ SSDs (1-3 full DWPD)
- Optimus Ascend™ SSDs (10 full DWPD)
- Optimus Ultra™ SSDs (25 full DWPD), and
- Optimus Extreme™ SSDs (45 full DWPD)
With this update, the Optimus SSD product family delivers a single SAS platform that can address a broad range of enterprise application performance, capacity and endurance requirements.
The Optimus MAX SSD and renewed Optimus family of drives will be available with TCG Enterprise Security Subsystem Class compliance to select OEMs and through the channel in Q3-2014. For more information about the Optimus MAX SSD or the rest of the Optimus product family, please visit www.sandisk.com/enterprise. A video about the new Optimus MAX can also be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPrdk0sY1xM&feature=youtu.be and further notes on the potential Optimus MAX brings to data center infrastructure can be read on the SanDisk Enterprise Blog site.
