SanDisk announces ULLtraDIMM design win with Huawei

"The ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of ultra-low latency flash storage throughout the data centre 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. "We are very excited to partner with Huawei to offer this innovative, ultra-low latency storage solution, which will accelerate the performance of its customers' cloud, virtualisation, OLTP, HPC and other applications, and help them experience the benefits of a flash-transformed data centre."

Huawei is committed to delivering complete SSD solutions that combine the power of the ULLtraDIMM with Huawei's self-developed caching software in order to accelerate application performance with the lowest possible latency, while offering the scalability to handle bandwidth-intensive database and virtualisation applications. With the ULLtraDIMM SSD, Huawei's RH8100 V3 servers can deliver random write IOPS improved by more than 100 percent in a 4 x 400G RAID0 configuration, which provides more than four times the number of IOPS per server. Huawei will also look to offer the ULLtraDIMM SSD as part of the Huawei Cache solution for key database and virtualisation deployments.

"The performance of the SanDisk Extreme PRO cards is amazing, and we are incredibly excited by what they will allow our customers to do," said Grant Petty, CEO, Blackmagic Design. "URSA is the world's first digital camera designed around a user-upgradable sensor and lens mount, and a critical part of its design is the use of a dual CFast 2.0 recorder for nonstop recording. With these new SanDisk cards, our customers can dual-record and capture at incredible speeds."

"We are eager to leverage the ULLtraDIMM in our new RH8100 servers in order to provide our customers with solutions that help maximise their performance per watt, per square foot with innovations in power savings and cooling, as well as increased compute and storage density," said Qiu Long, President of Server Business, IT Product Line, Huawei. "With the ULLtraDIMM, we can deliver complete solutions that offer a cost-effective path to scalable, ultra-low latency performance for database and virtualisation applications." Enterprise data volumes have already broken through traditional storage barriers and, based on IDC statistics, by 2020 global data volumes are expected to reach 44 zetabytes. The growth of these business functions coupled with end-users' demand for instant access to information are spurring the need for a revolution in how chief information officers (CIOs) leverage storage to manage requirements while red ucing total cost of ownership (TCO).

"Having the ability to accelerate applications and reduce latency will have tremendous value in Huawei's enterprise strategy. Our 2014 market research indicated that Huawei's servers have been ranked as the top server choice for cloud and mobility in China. By leveraging SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM in its RH8100 V3 servers, Huawei will strengthen its technology portfolio and value in the enterprise market sector," said Linsey Yang, Analyst of Sino-Bridges Research and Consulting Ltd., a leading Chinese research firm.

The addition of flash technology on the DRAM memory channel expands the growing penetration of flash storage technology in enterprise data centres, and complements SanDisk's existing flash-based server hardware and software storage solutions. Utilising flash on the memory bus ensures ultra-low latency in business applications and results in improved application response times. Additional ULLtraDIMM SSDs can also be added to available DIMM slots, scaling performance and capacity without impacting latency. This creates new opportunities for server system designs to support use cases that require extremely fast storage, such as VDI, transaction processing, virtualisation and cloud computing.