HGST Offers NVM Express Compliant Solid-State Drives

Western Digital announced it is shipping its NVMe compliant Ultrastar SN100 Series PCIe SSDs - the industry's highest-performing NVMe compliant SSDs.

The new HGST PCIe SSDs are a key building block for delivering HGST server-side Flash solutions. In these solutions, the Ultrastar SN100 Series SSDs are combined with HGST server software - specifically, the HGST Flash Software Suite and HGST Device Manager. This powerful combination creates a server-side Flash platform solution with superior TCO that delivers clustering, scalability, high availability and manageability for performance applications. For MySQL, HGST's server-side Flash solutions have delivered up to 40 percent server consolidation with up to 60 percent performance improvement while maintaining existing MySQL architectures.

"With our new Ultrastar SN100 Series, HGST is helping today's data center professionals meet one of their most important and difficult storage challenges: deliver extremely high application performance in a cost-effective manner," said Mike Gustafson, senior vice president and general manager, HGST Flash Platforms Group. "By standardizing the deployment process with NVMe, IT organizations can now realize unprecedented gains in terms of application performance, server consolidation, and simplified setup and management in Linux, Windows and virtualized environments. This milestone is important as it allows customers to easily implement high-capacity PCIe SSDs at scale in a variety of data center environments."

The new Ultrastar SN100 Series delivers exceptional value by minimizing the cost of deploying and managing high-performance storage in scale-out and cloud environments. The HGST Ultrastar SN100 Series leverages standard NVMe drivers to take advantage of the benefits of PCIe without requiring vendor-unique drivers. This makes the Ultrastar SN100 Series as easy to deploy as traditional storage devices while offering the best performance. The Ultrastar SN100 Series is available in both a low profile half-height, half-length (HH-HL) add-in card, and a hot-swappable 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) drive for maximum serviceability. Both form factors are available in an industry-leading density of up to 3.2 TB.

Key TCO benefits of the Ultrastar SN100 Series include:

• Support for standardized NVMe driver - Eliminates need to install vendor-unique drivers to realize the performance benefits of PCIe SSDs. NVMe support is part of the server operating system, just like support for SATA or SAS SSDs.
• Performance leadership - Suited for the most demanding enterprise applications, including scale-out database workloads, the Ultrastar SN100 Series supports up to 310,000 random mixed read/write IOPS (70/30, 4KB), up to 160,000 random write IOPS (4KB), and up to 743,000 random read IOPS (4KB). Sequential read and write throughput is 3,000 MB/s and 1,600 MB/s, respectively.
• Industry-leading density and choice of form factor - Offered in two form factors: Half-height, half-length add-in card (1,600 GB, 3,200 GB), and 2.5-inch small form factor SSDs (800 GB, 1,600 GB, 3,200 GB).
• Broad system interoperability - Built upon an industry-standard interface utilizing four lanes of PCIe Generation 3.0 (x4) combined with the NVMe protocol, the new SSDs are supported in a large variety of server systems.

Backed by HGST's commitment to quality and reliability, the Ultrastar SN150 HH-HL add-in card is shipping now. The 2.5-inch SFF Ultrastar SN100 SSDs will be available in May.