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

It’s no surprise that FOX Business’ “After the Bell” anchor Liz Claman chose to feature SanDisk CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra recently during her special segment “Three Days in the Valley” – an exclusive behind-the-scenes look inside Silicon Valley.

Sanjay discussed SanDisk’s rapid expansion into enterprise computing and offered his views on the direction of the enterprise storage market and the continued growth in the use of flash memory technologies. Highlights from the interview include:

“Flash usage in enterprise applications is increasing…Flash in data centers, flash in cloud applications, servers…is being disruptive to hard disk storage. What flash is doing, because of its attributes of running fast, giving you fast response times when you’re trying to access your data through the cloud on your mobile devices, flash takes up less space, flash also takes up less power so it really provides a lot of value that’s why it’s growing in data centers…”

In discussing the SanDisk Enterprise SSD business, Sanjay described the value advanced SSD technology can bring to data centers, “…It goes into your data centers, it lets you access your data fast, and data centers are increasingly using it to give consumers and enterprise businessmen a strong experience with fast data access.”

Check out the full interview here.

Greg

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

SanDisk Lightning® Enterprise Solid State Drives (SSDs) are now offered in Stratus ftScalable® G2 Storage, a fault-tolerant array manufactured for Stratus by Dot Hill. The Stratus array connects to the entire fault-tolerant ftServer system line, providing customers with industry-leading uptime assurance for servers and storage.

Lightning SSDs are mission-optimized for supporting critical business operations identical to those that Stratus is known for protecting against latency and downtime, making our drives ideal for Stratus customers.

You can view the full press release here.

Greg

SanDisk® ESS director of engineering, Mike James, has been elected to the SCSI Trade Association (STA) Board of Directors. The STA is a prominent, member-run industry association established to support and promote the understanding and benefits of SCSI technology to the industry.

Mike James’ election to the STA Board of Directors further underscores our commitment to be an end-to-end resource for IT managers and OEM system developers and designers within the enterprise storage space.

Congratulations Mike!

Greg