UPDATED 07:28 EDT / APRIL 29 2015

SanDisk’s new flash drives pack four times the bang for the storage buck

apple-flash-storage-300x269.jpgSanDisk Corp. hopes to offset the weakening demand for its flash storage in the consumer world with a new generation of server-class drives that incorporate improved technology to provide greatly increased performance across the board. The launch marks the first major upgrade to the hardware since its absorption into company through the billion-dollar acquisition of Fusion.io Inc. last year.

The biggest change introduced with the third iteration of the ioMemory series is that the 20 nanometer solid-state memory from Micron Technology Inc. that was previously used inside has been replaced with homegrown 19 nanometer  flash that can execute random reads more than twice as fast. And it does so with less delay, too, thanks to updated middleware that offsets much of the work involved in the process to the host server.

The new cards can achieve that heightened peak performance using only 25 watts of power compared to the 40 watts it took the previous generation, a potentially significant reduction in electricity costs over the life of a drive. That comes on top of the 61 percent reduction in the list price, which SanDisk says adds up to  make the series more than four times more cost-efficient than its predecessor.

That’s an impressive increase even in view of Wikibon’s aggressive forecast on the continued decline of flash prices, which is set to surpass disk as the most affordable storage option for most active data workloads by 2016. That is one of the main contributors to the strong growth SanDisk is seeing in its enterprise business, which is emerging as a key counterweight to the declining demand from the consumer side that dragged down its net profit 40 percent last quarter on a year-over-year basis.

The company hopes to seize on that enterprise momentum by incorporating the new ioMemory technology into no fewer than four separate product lines meant to address the full gamut of workloads that stand to benefit from the increased performance. Chief among the additions is the PX600 series, which can pack between one 1 terabyte to 5.2 depending on the configuration.

The model is specifically geared toward mission-critical applications that require ultra-fast access to information, such as database and real-time analytic processes of the kind found in the financial world. For organizations on a tighter budget, SanDisk is offering the SX350 and SX300, which provide a more even balance between cost and performance that is preferable when it comes to less read-intensive workloads such as virtual machines, caching and graphic design.

Joining the server drives is a new mezzanine variation designed for use with blade systems incorporating small nodes in a single chassis, particularly the Gen8 and Gen9 machines from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Cisco Systems Inc.’s newest B-Series. The card offers twice the performance of the previous generation thanks to the new 19nm technology in addition to 33 percent more capacity.


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