ACADEMIA

SMART Storage Systems announced the CloudSpeed 500 Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s solid-state drive (SSD). Leveraging cost effective consumer grade multi-level cell (MLC) Flash, CloudSpeed 500 is an enterprise-class SSD that delivers the high-performance and endurance required in enterprise server environments at consumer MLC value, fundamentally changing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for cloud storage and server applications.

With the rise of social networking and other cloud computing services, data creation and the need to access data in near real-time has grown at an unprecedented rate. This has led enterprise organizations to utilize SSDs in order to meet the throughput levels necessary to work with an ever-increasing data-set. In the past, enterprise organizations turned to client-class SSDs leveraging consumer MLC Flash because they provided significant performance improvements over traditional hard disk drives (HDD) at a lower cost than higher-endurance SSDs utilizing single-level cell (SLC) Flash. However, client-class SSDs are designed for read-intensive environments and quickly wear out in typical cloud storage and server mixed workload environments. This has forced IT managers to use a consumption model, resulting in the need to replace an SSD multiple times within a typical warranty period, driving up TCO.

Leveraging SMART Storage Systems' Guardian Technology Platform, a proprietary suite of enterprise features and endurance enhancement technologies, the new CloudSpeed 500 SSD can achieve up to 5x higher endurance than competing consumer MLC-based SSDs. This enables enterprise organizations to extend the working life of their storage and avoid constant SSD replacement.

"Until now, IT managers had to choose between very high-endurance, high-cost SSD's or lower-cost, 'read mostly' client SSDs," said John Scaramuzzo, president at SMART Storage Systems. "This posed a problem for many organizations, as neither SSD type was designed for the light to moderate mixed workloads required in the server and cloud environments. With the release of the CloudSpeed 500 SSD, we are solving this problem by delivering up to 5 times longer SSD life while maintaining the value of consumer MLC. This fundamentally changes the TCO game for server and cloud storage applications."

Available in capacities from 60 - 480GB, the new CloudSpeed 500 is a SATA 6Gb/s SSD that achieves up to 500MB/s of sustained read/write performance and 60K/20K random read/write IOPS. Satisfying the requirements of enterprise server environments, the CloudSpeed 500 offers a full line of enterprise features, including SMART Storage Systems' third generation backup power circuit technology and a five year warranty.

The CloudSpeed 500 will begin sampling to select customers later in the second quarter of 2012.