SanDisk and Super Micro Computer ULLtraDIMM SSD

SanDisk and Super Micro announced that the SanDisk ULLtraDIMM solid state drive (SSD), the industry's first enterprise-class, ultra-low latency, memory-channel connected storage solution, will begin shipping in Supermicro's Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms. 

Adding flash storage on the memory bus provides Supermicro with a powerful solution to help customers address growing data center application performance requirements without a significant infrastructure investment.

"The ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application - no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive," said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "We are very excited to partner with Supermicro in offering this innovative, ultra-low latency storage solution to help their customers accelerate the performance of their cloud, virtualization, HPC and other applications and experience the benefits of a flash-transformed data center."

Eric Burgener, research director for IDC's storage practice, said: "Memory channel storage options like SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM consistently deliver lower storage latencies than data center SAN solutions can. There are a number of different application environments, including database, VDI, and mixed virtual workloads, that can directly benefit from these types of lower latencies, and more and more organizations are deploying them. With this design win under its belt, it's clear that SanDisk's partners are seeing a good market opportunity for these types of host-based storage solutions."

Supermicro tested the 200 GB and 400 GB capacities of the ULLtraDIMM SSD under a variety of enterprise workloads and end-user scenarios. The benchmarks showed that the ULLtraDIMM SSD provides the lowest latency storage option available today.

"Supermicro leads the industry with the widest range of innovative, high performance, green computing solutions and delivers the lowest latency server and storage platforms on the market with SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM technology," said Wally Liaw, Sr. Vice President of Sales at Supermicro. "With complete in-memory compute optimized solutions, we offer the most cost-effective path to scalable, ultra-low latency performance for mission-critical, data-intensive workloads in data center, cloud, enterprise, virtualization, financial Services and HPC applications."

The award-winning ULLtraDIMM SSD can be integrated into an existing DIMM slot, which removes the performance bottleneck from the storage subsystem. This ensures ultra-low latency in business applications and results in improved application response times. Additionally, adding ULLtraDIMM SSDs to systems can scale performance and capacity without impacting latency. This creates new opportunities for server system designs to support use cases that require extremely fast storage, such as VDI, transaction processing, virtualization, and cloud computing.

The ULLtraDIMM SSD, which was developed in partnership with Diablo Technologies, is expected to begin shipping in Supermicro's SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms in Q4 2014.