Last week I had the privilege of attending the NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas, along with Tom Matson, Channel Sales Manager for FlashSoft software. NetApp® has a rich history of delivering game-changing technology and it was clear from the Insight event that they are still at it, particularly in solid-state caching technology. It was awesome to see the number of sessions covering flash technology and server-side caching.

SanDisk is a NetApp Advantage Alliance Partner. Our partnership with NetApp helps us bring SanDisk’s FlashSoft™ software to enterprise, mission-critical applications that require server-side caching to meet their requirements for high-performance storage. FlashSoft software leverages enterprise flash to reduce I/O latency. This reduction in latency is a key enabler for increased performance and scalability for databases, enterprise applications, and virtualization environments.

In my conversations with NetApp Insight attendees, a couple of key points that resonated were our hardware independence and our agentless design.

Hardware Independent – FlashSoft is designed to work with any solid-state technology, whether from SanDisk or another vendor. Our open approach allows customers to select the flash hardware best suited to their specific needs. This flexibility was a key requirement for many of the people I spoke to at Insight.

Agentless Design – A second point that resonated with attendees is the fact that our software is agentless. This is critical in virtualized environments, where a single host can run multiple VMs. Being agentless means that no software is installed in the VM. In an enterprise environment that may have hundreds of virtualized hosts running thousands of VMs, installing agents in each VM introduces management overhead that admins want to avoid. Because the FlashSoft design is agentless, agents in VMs are simply not an issue. Installation on a virtualized host is straightforward, and users begin realizing caching benefits immediately.

We are excited to be working with NetApp to deliver solutions that allow customers to better meet the demands of the enterprise data center.

Victoria

The Nikkei Global Management Forum is a special event that each year brings together a carefully chosen group of the world’s most accomplished business executives. The aim is to discuss corporate strategy, management philosophy and the latest trends in management from a truly global perspective. Since its inauguration in 1999, the Forum has come to be recognized as one of the most prestigious international conferences in Asia.

The theme for the 14th Nikkei Global Management Forum is “Visionary Leadership: The Path Forward in a Changing World,” and president and CEO of SanDisk, Sanjay Mehrotra, was invited to address this esteemed group of industry leaders on this topic. In his presentation, titled “Flash Memory: Driving Change,” Sanjay discussed the importance of risk-taking and the constant effort to drive flash technologies forward within the context of a constantly evolving global platform.

Mike Chenery

The FlashSoft team was at VMworld Europe last week in Barcelona. I don’t want to make you jealous, but if you missed the event, you missed a great opportunity to mix with more than 7,000 virtualization professionals like yourself, in Barcelona, in some beautiful Mediterranean weather. But I digress.

I had an interview with W. Curtis Preston of Truth In IT, during the conversation, we coined a new expression: “storage of record.” I have been meeting customers and partners who describe the same dilemma: how do you improve the performance of a storage system that you can’t touch?

As we talk about in the interview, business requirements like regulatory and standards compliance, and technical requirements like backup are increasingly built into the storage infrastructure, making the storage “untouchable”. OK, not always untouchable, but it’s always a very nervous, “sweaty-palms” touch — with lot of constraints and lots of interested parties.

Riffing on the idea of a “system of record” – a familiar concept in information management – we talked abouthow a lot of IT professionals know that flash can improve storage performance, but they can’t touch their organizations’ storage systems, because the entire storage infrastructure has become a kind of system of record. And it’s not just IT that relies on this “storage of record”, it’s Operations, it’s Legal, it’s Finance.

That’s where FlashSoft software can help. Because FlashSoft implements a flash-based cache in the server, it accelerates I/O between server and storage, enabling faster, more scalable storage performance without touching the SAN or any storage systems. Without changing your “storage of record”.

See my interview here, and let us know if you’ve got a “storage of record” problem.

Peter Crosby
Product Manager for SanDisk

According to the recent briefing report from Eric Slack, senior analyst for Storage Switzerland, “‘More and faster’ seems to be the focus of many solid state storage devices…[but] SanDisk took a different approach with the Lightning Solid State Accelerator.”

There are many storage offerings in the market today that offer “impressive top end specs, but can’t sustain even a reasonable level of performance when under severe workloads…SanDisk’s Lightning SSA was designed to address this problem.”

Sustained, predictable performance over time at a cost-effective price point to provide consistent application acceleration regardless of the workloads that a given device is subjected to is what customers need for success. And, the Lightning PCIe SSAs offer just that. Plus, when combined with FlashSoft caching solutions, “the Lightning SSA can deliver consistent, predictable acceleration, regardless of workload, at a price point that fits more use cases.”

Check out the full report, including additional specs and details, here.

Greg

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

June was an exciting month for the SanDisk Enterprise Storage Group (ESS). We launched SanDisk’s new enterprise Lightning® PCI Express (PCIe) Solid State Accelerator (SSA) cards at COMPUTEX Taipei. Our own Greg Goelz, vice president and general manager of ESS, also participated in the Global ICT Summit 2012 in Tokyo, Japan. Greg joined other technology leaders in a panel discussion at the summit, sponsored by Nikkei Inc. and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, where he discussed how flash memory storage solutions in the enterprise are addressing the challenges of managing big data.

Photo courtesy of Global ICT Summit 2012

C.T.

Today, SanDisk expanded its portfolio of enterprise storage solutions with the new Lightning® PCI Express (PCIe) Solid State Accelerator (SSA) cards. The PCIe SSAs combine SanDisk’s proven enterprise SSD technology and its NAND Flash leadership to provide OEMs and system integrators with an ideal solution for accelerating enterprise applications in data centers, server farms and cloud computing environments.

SanDisk PCIe SSAs deliver low latency, low maximum response time during peak periods using our advanced controller to manage data protection and I/O functions with little impact on the CPU and without adding costly DRAM. This type of performance is ideal for a wide range of businesses, including financial institutions analyzing and processing massive amounts of information around the clock; to social media and website providers whose customers demand a nearly instant response with every click of a mouse; to media content creators editing high-definition videos.

We’re really excited about offering PCIe solutions to the enterprise market, so stay tuned for more good news from SanDisk in this area in the future.

The full press release with additional information and specs can be found here. A video overview and high-level description of the new PCIe products can also be viewed here.

Greg

StorageReview.com editor Kevin O’Brien is quite familiar with the latest offerings from SanDisk, including those resulting from the Pliant Technology acquisition nearly a year ago. As such, he was looking forward to the opportunity to test drive the SanDisk Lightning® LB406S Enterprise SSD for his readers.

Overall, when compared to others, the SanDisk Lightning drive offered class-leading performance, with Kevin noting, “…it really shined in areas with a mixture of read and write activity that generally brought other drives down.”

Considering SanDisk’s level of enterprise storage expertise, Kevin concluded, “The drive’s performance makes us that much more excited for the next generation SSD where the full benefit of the Pliant/SanDisk relationship can be realized.”

Check out the full review here.

C.T.

* SanDisk provided a drive for testing purposes

SanDisk believes that high performance interfaces are key to delivering the full performance potential of PCIe-based SSDs. Dave Landsman, SanDisk senior staff standardization engineer, shared his thoughts on NVMe-based solutions.

Click here to read Dave’s post on the NVM Express blog.

Greg