SanDisk has acquired caching software provider, FlashSoft, extending SanDisk’s Enterprise Solutions portfolio and strengthening its position as an industry leader in the enterprise storage space.

FlashSoft enables flash products such as SanDisk’s Lightning® Enterprise SSDs to be configured as high-performance cache for servers’ HDD storage, allowing customers to improve performance with smaller, more cost effective storage configurations and to deploy more virtual machines per server in virtualized environments.

We’re excited to welcome FlashSoft to SanDisk’s enterprise storage team and look forward to new, innovative solutions we can create together.

Greg

PS: You can see the full press release here for more detail on the acquisition.

SanDisk Lightning Enterprise Solid State Drives (SSDs) have been named the gold winner in the Enterprise Products of the Year category in the Best in Biz Awards, the only national business awards program judged by members of the press and industry analysts.

Best in Biz Awards 2011 were presented in more than 30 categories, including Best Overall Company of the Year, Most Innovative Company of the Year, Executive of the Year and Best New Product of the Year. More than 150 entries were received in this year’s awards program, from an impressive array of public and private companies from a variety of industries, sectors and regions. The companies that won gold, silver and bronze awards in this year’s program represent the best in American business.

Being named the Gold winner further underscores our ongoing commitment to providing IT managers and OEM system developers and designers with the best performing enterprise-class data storage solutions possible.

You can see the complete list of winners here: http://www.bestinbizawards.com/2011-winners-product/.

Greg

Shortly following SanDisk’s acquisition of Pliant Technology, editor Logan Harbaugh put five drives with price ranging from $250 to $8400 to the test for his review on ITworld.com, including our Lightning® LS 300S 3.5” 300GB drive*. Others include:

• Intel SSDSA2SH064G1GC 2.5” 64GB
• LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 (SSS-6200) PCI-E 300GB
• OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE OWCSSDMXRE400 2.5” 400GB
• Plextor PX-128M2S-02 2.5” 128GB

The Lightning drive fared incredibly well among the competition, with Logan noting, “Of the drives connected by SATA or SAS, the Pliant was the clear performance winner, with very high throughput and very low response times, ideal for database applications.” In addition, with no performance degradation during the write-intensive test and available expandability, he concluded that the Lightning drive is an “excellent choice for databases that are performance-limited by storage performance.”

Check out the full review here when you have the chance.

Greg

*SanDisk provided a drive for testing purposes

We are very excited today to be kicking off Enterprise Storage Sense, the SanDisk® Enterprise Storage Solutions (ESS) blog. The blog name may feel familiar to some – and so, a little background: In May of this year, SanDisk acquired Pliant Technology, a leader in high-performance, highly-reliable enterprise-class SAS SSD solutions. Since then, the team has been busy integrating into the company and continuing to develop innovative, new enterprise SSD solutions to expand the Lightning® product family offering. And thus, the Enterprise Storage Solutions division of SanDisk – SanDisk ESS – was formed.

Stay tuned for SanDisk and enterprise IT/storage system industry updates, insight, news and more from the ESS team. It’s great to be back online….

Greg