As we’ve said earlier, this year’s VMworld was a huge event for the SanDisk FlashSoft product team. Following the launch of FlashSoft™ Software for VMware® vSphere®, this year’s VMworld event in San Francisco was our first big opportunity to share our software with virtualization professionals on a large scale.

Some of our partners and customers joined us at the event, and we have a short video featuring them speaking about their experiences with FlashSoft software, and their plans for the future. You can watch the full video here.

A few highlights:

Gary Lamb, CTO of NextCloud, talks about how increasing VM density provides a competitive advantage to a cloud services provider, and the value of the FlashSoft software integrating cleanly with the hypervisor.

Tim Russell, VP of Data Life Cycle Solutions at NetApp, discusses how working with SanDisk, NetApp can address a broader range of customer performance requirements.

Kaku Yamaguchi of SCSK Corporation describes how the company is looking to alleviate IO bottlenecks for the company’s data center customers.

Shridar Subramanian, VP of Marketing at Virident, speaks about how caching with FlashSoft keeps the benefits of shared storage, while delivering the performance benefits of PCIe flash.

Enjoy!

Rich

This week members from the SanDisk FlashSoft team are at the Intel Developer Forum, along with other members of the SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions group. The hardware team has been doing innovative work with NVMe, and is demonstrating the potential for NVMe flash devices with a very cool prototype.

But you might be asking, what’s that got to do with the FlashSoft software?

In the rapidly evolving world of server-tier caching solutions, many early innovations coupled the caching software to a specific flash hardware device or standard. The FlashSoft product design explicitly avoided doing this, because our engineering team knew that enterprise flash technology was developing quickly, with new physical architectures like eMLC and new interface standards like NVMe. Thinking about the future potential of our technology, we chose a completely hardware-neutral software design that would require minimal system overhead.

From the first FlashSoft software release two years ago, to our most recently announced release for VMware vSphere®, one thing that has never changed is the message that FlashSoft software can use any enterprise flash device – SATA, SAS or PCIe – from any vendor – as a cache in the server. In fact, we recently announced our business collaboration with Virident to underscore that message for our mutual customers.

One thing is changing now. Instead of just saying “SATA, SAS, or PCIe”, we’ll be adding NVMe to the interfaces for which we validate our software.

If your server-tier caching technology is anchored to a specific vendor’s flash hardware, controller, or interface, you might want to ask about NVMe. It’s not the only future development that might affect your caching roadmap, but it is one of the most important.

And if you’re at IDF this week, stop by and meet the SanDisk team – hardware and software. Because both sides of our team have a lot to share with you about NVMe.

Rich

We’re looking forward to the Intel Developer Forum this week in San Francisco. Joined by 13 other leading storage solutions companies, including Dell, EMC, Intel and NetApp, we’ll have live demonstrations of NVM Express technology in our kiosk (#444) in the NVM Express Showcase.

NVMe (non-volatile memory express) is an optimized, high performance, scalable host controller interface designed for enterprise and client PCIe SSDs. As an alternative to traditional storage interfaces that were created to support the requirements of spinning magnetic media, new solid state storage interfaces like NVMe fully leverage the low latency benefits of NAND flash media to significantly boost storage performance.

The NVM Express technology demonstration uses a SanDisk-developed controller based on our proprietary IP, and implements native PCIe transport. It supports the NVM Express protocol, and extends the SanDisk enterprise SSD architecture that delivers fast, predictable performance and superior reliability.

At SanDisk, we are committed to delivering leading edge solutions that bring the performance and efficiency benefits of flash-based storage to the enterprise, and are excited to demonstrate this innovative new technology.

If you want to check out the live demos, come by and see me in the SanDisk kiosk within the NVMe Community area, located within the Technology Showcase at IDF 2012 at Moscone West.

Mike

As part of SanDisk’s enterprise strategy, we will now be working with Virident Systems on several sales and marketing programs, highlighting the boost in performance that customers can achieve when pairing Virident PCIe flash storage with SanDisk FlashSoft software.

FlashSoft software and Virident FlashMAX are available for Linux, Windows Server and VMware® vSphere™ environments, giving customers the ability to use this complementary solution on a variety of platforms.

James Bagley senior analyst with Storage Strategies NOW, commented on the partnership, saying,
“This collaboration between Virident and SanDisk is good news for customers who want the benefits of SanDisk’s caching software, as well as the reliable performance of Virident’s storage-class memory for the caching hardware platform. The relationship between the two companies serves as a proof point to SanDisk’s enterprise solutions strategy and Virident’s commitment to ecosystem partnerships to deliver a complete enterprise hardware and software solution to a growing customer base.”

Click here for the full press release.

Greg