ProLiant Servers Offer New Class of 12Gb/s SAS SSD Targeted to Replace SATA SSDs in Server Applications

SAN JOSE, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 10, 2019 — Toshiba Memory America, Inc. (TMA), the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, today announced the availability of its RM5 Series of value SAS (vSAS) SSDs on HPE ProLiant servers. Toshiba Memory is the first to introduce vSAS – a new class of SSD that is expected to replace enterprise SATA SSDs in most server applications. Value SAS SSDs deliver advancements in performance, capacity, manageability, reliability, and data security at very comparable price points. RM5 SSDs are single-ported versions of Toshiba Memory’s robust enterprise SAS product family and provide higher performance per slot than competing SATA SSDs, thus enabling better utilization of system resources under I/O intensive workloads.

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Since the SATA interface is performance-limited, no future advancements are planned on its roadmap. In many data-intensive environments, SSDs based on SATA have become a bottleneck to servers, preventing the CPU from performing required operations or transactions in a timely manner. This underutilization of the server’s compute capabilities can also affect the number of users that can be serviced at one time. Because SATA was designed as a lower cost interface for consumer-grade hard drives, its 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, half-duplex transmission, limited queue depths, and restrictive protocol means that it cannot leverage the full capabilities of flash memory.

The RM5 Series delivers twice the interface speed of SATA, with full-duplex 12Gb/s links. The drives utilize cutting-edge 64-layer BiCS FLASH™ TLC (3-bit-per-cell) 3D flash memory developed by Toshiba Memory Corporation. Available capacities range from 960 gigabytes (GB) to 7,680GB¹. The products support superior bandwidth and Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) than SATA, including sequential reads up to 838 megabytes per second (MB/s), sequential writes up to 650MB/s, random reads up to 150,000 IOPS, and random writes up to 50,000 IOPS². Compared to typical enterprise SATA SSDs, the RM5 Series is about 2x faster under mixed read/write workloads³.

“In our system-level OLTP benchmarking⁴, RM5 SSDs deliver 25 percent higher application-level performance at up to 85 percent lower transactional latency than SATA SSDs,” said Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager, SSD business unit, Toshiba Memory America, Inc. “By replacing SATA drives with vSAS drives in servers, HPE customers can realize significantly improved system-level performance per dollar.”

“We are committed to improving application performance for our customers and with the HPE ProLiant servers, we are delivering secure, software defined compute that delivers the speed, scale and economics needed for hybrid cloud deployments,” said Shin-Wen Kuo, vice president of Workloads and Server Options at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). “Through our collaboration with Toshiba Memory to integrate its SAS server storage solution with HPE ProLiant servers, we are enabling customers to upgrade from SATA to SAS performance at an affordable price point while leveraging their existing server infrastructure.”

Providing high data security and reliability, the RM5 Series offers full FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification and supports various levels of security features including Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) and Sanitize Instant Erase (SIE) configurations. These value SAS SSDs are directly compatible with most sockets that SATA SSDs are used in today, making them especially valuable to enable hardware-based RAID configurations. Since the majority of ProLiant servers include a SAS host bus adapter (HBA) or RAID card, SAS and SATA SSDs can be used in the same drive bay, making it a seamless performance upgrade.

The RM5 Series of value SAS SSDs is now available in HPE ProLiant servers and is priced to compete with enterprise SATA SSDs – at a lower cost than mainstream SAS SSDs. For more information regarding pricing and availability, contact your local HPE ProLiant sales representative or visit https://us.toshiba-memory.com/life-after-sata.

About Toshiba Memory America, Inc.

Toshiba Memory America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba Memory Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough 96-layer BiCS FLASH™ 3D technology, Toshiba continues to lead innovation and move the industry forward. For more information on Toshiba Memory, please visit business.toshiba-memory.com and follow us on social media.

© 2019 Toshiba Memory America, Inc. All rights reserved. Information in this press release, including product pricing and specifications, content of services, and contact information is current and believed to be accurate on the date of the announcement, but is subject to change without prior notice. Technical and application information contained here is subject to the most recent applicable Toshiba product specifications.

Notes:

All trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective companies.

¹ Definition of capacity: Toshiba Memory Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 2³⁰ bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes, 1TB = 2⁴⁰ bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.

² Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.

³ RM5 SSD performance is 105,000 IOPS using a mixed use workload of 70 percent read operations and 30 percent write operations at 4KB block sizes. Enterprise SATA SSD performance is based on Micron 5200 Pro publicly available product specifications using a mixed use workload of 70 percent read operations and 30 percent write operations at 4KB block sizes. The mixed workload performance was 53,000 to 57,000 IOPS. As such, RM5 SSDs are about 2x faster under mixed read/write workloads.

⁴ System-level OLTP benchmarking conducted by Toshiba Memory America included RM5 Series SSDs (960GB capacities) and enterprise SATA SSDS (960GB capacities), in an emulated OLTP environment. Results were based on three runs that tested average transactions per minute (tpm) and overall disk latency (microseconds). Read and write speed may vary, as well as latency, depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and benchmark programs. Toshiba Memory defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes and a kibibyte (KiB) as 2¹⁰ bytes, or 1,024 bytes. Sequential read and write performance, and latency, mentioned herein are reference data, and may vary from the RM5 product data in the datasheet.

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