Posted on Monday, December 12 2011 @ 20:38 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
SandForce presents the SF-2481, new solid state disk controller designed for cloud computing environments.
SandForce® Inc., the innovator of Solid State Drive (SSD) Processors that drive ubiquitous deployment of volume flash memory into primary and I/O intensive data storage applications, today announces the SF-2481 SSD Processor – the first SSD Processor optimized for cloud computing environments. This booming storage segment uniquely demands the performance and reliability of enterprise SSDs balanced with volume Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash in order to meet the ever-increasing solid state storage demands of the world’s leading cloud services providers.
"As the SSD market matures, architectures are being developed to satisfy the specific needs of various market segments," said Jim Handy, SSD analyst for Objective Analysis. "SandForce is wisely targeting one of the most important SSD markets by tuning a variant of its high-performance SSD Processor to the needs of the Internet data center. This should be a good deal both for SandForce and for the company's cloud computing customers."
The SF-2481 SSD Processor features a number of innovations including increasing the endurance of SSDs built with standard MLC flash by incorporating nearly twice the normal error correction strength. In addition, it adds outstanding Predictive Failure Analysis capabilities including a new Media Health Test to ensure the highest reliability over the life of the storage solution. These are combined with the many other outstanding features of the current award-winning second generation SandForce SATA 6 Gigabit/sec SSD Processors with DuraClass technology including:
DuraWrite™ technology to enable the industry’s highest balanced performance, lowest write amplification, and most efficient garbage collection
Balanced sequential read and write speeds of up to 500 Megabytes/sec
Balanced random read and write speeds of up to 60,000 I/Os per second
RAISE™ technology to protect user data from entirely lost sectors, pages and blocks
Automatic double AES encryption equal to 300-bit protection with Secure Crypto-Erase control
Enterprise-level SMART attributes (with the Media Health Test) to enable predictive failure analysis
User configurable over provisioning to provide increased flexibility when balancing endurance with performance to further optimize individual cloud environments
"Storage needs in Cloud computing is exploding worldwide, and to optimize the total cost of ownership, the cloud environment needs solid-state storage that performs at the highest levels with the greatest longevity and reliability on standard MLC flash,” said Jeremy Werner, Director of Marketing for SandForce. “The SF-2481 SSD Processor was specifically designed to deliver the perfect combination of performance, endurance, and intelligence required in cloud computing data centers.”
The SF-2481 SSD Processor is sampling to OEMs now and will ship in mass production in January 2012.
This Cloud Computing SSD Processor announcement follows the news, which has been positively mentioned in numerous storage industry reports, that LSI Corporation signed a definitive agreement to acquire SandForce and expected closure in the first quarter of 2012. Also, the Global Semiconductor Alliance named SandForce the winner of the GSA 2011 Outstanding Revenue Growth by a Private Semiconductor Company award.
