SanDisk pumps up Fusion flash power despite price drop

Data centre

SanDisk has outed a new range of ioDrive PCIe and mezzanine flash cards that cut down on costs whilst maintaining the same performance that server customers have come to expect.

The third-generation Fusion ioMemory PCIe app accelarators can deliver a four-fold price performance increase and have a 61% lower list price compared to the Fusion ioDrive 2 product of before.

SanDisk's new portfolio is headed by the brand new SX350 and refreshed SX300, both of which range in capacity from 1.25TB to as much as 6.4TB. The new memory uses SanDisk NAND flash chips instead of the Micron chips for the first time. SanDisk explained the flash cards are designed for mixed-use workloads including virtualisation, databases, business intelligence and real-time financial data processing.

The SX300 and SX350 are also suitable for read-intensive workloads such as web hosting, data mining, content caching, CAD/CAM and 3D animation. Both offer twice the random read/write I/O performance of the previous version and the SX350 goes further by bringing the aforementioned four-fold price to performance saving.

For an even higher level of performance there is the PX600 that ranges in size from 1TB and 5.2TB for a PCIe card designed for server virtualisation, databases, business intelligence and real-time financial data processing. With up to 385K random write IOPS, an ultra-low 15 microsecond write latency and twice as much bandwidth as the previous version; it's a significant update.

The new Mezzanine series is designed for HP Gen9 and Gen8 BladeSystem Services plus the very latest Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and is created to deliver a higher level of performance and density in virtualisation environments that hard disks cannot provide.

Finally, the FlashSoft Bundles offer organisations the chance to benefit from Fusion ioMemory flash hardware and caching software in one solution that is easy to evaluate, deploy and support.

7,000+ happy customers

A shade over 150,000 Fusion ioMemory PCIe application accelerators have been rolled out to upwards of 7,000 customers worldwide including ObjectRocket by Rackspace, Pandora, various universities and DataLogix.

SanDisk paid a cool $1.1 billion (about £650 million, or AU $1.17 billion) for Fusion-io and its ioMemory technology less than a year ago and has been busy outfitting its data centres with flash memory ever since.