Enabling performance and density gains for Cloud infrastructures

“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, CSP and 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 initiatives[2]. 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.