SanDisk has announced its newest ULLtraDIMM Solid State Drive (SSD) which is an enterprise-class, ultra-low latency, memory channel storage solution aimed to be used with enterprise servers. Based on 1xnm MLC flash, these new SSDs will be available in 200 and 400GB capacities and offer quite an improvement over any existing flash storage devices, including PCI-Express based ones.


Pushing the flash storage as close as possible to the CPU is certainly a great idea as it provides much better latencies while sustained write performance of up to 760MB/s and random read/write performance of 150K/60K IOPS does not sound bad either. According to SanDisk, IBM will be first to use the ULLtraDIMM SSD under the eXFlash DIMM brand name and is already available as an option with IBM x3850 and x3950 X6 servers. According to SanDisk and IBM's internal testing, the eXFlash DIMM SSD achieved 5-10 microsecond write latency, which is definitely an impressive result.

"The SanDisk ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of ultra-low latency flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application, no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive," said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "The ULLtraDIMM SSD's linear performance scalability and innovative DIMM form factor allow organizations to deploy flash as their application requirements change, without requiring significant infrastructure investment."

SanDisk developed the ULLtraDIMM SSD in cooperation with Diablo Technologies and although these are now only limited to enterprise server market, we might even see it in consumer desktop market as well.



Source: Sandisk.com.