SanDisk Corporation 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 throughput, 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 initiatives. 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.
