SandForce, a leading designer of controllers for solid-state drives, on Monday announced the SF-2481 SSD controller which it claims to be the first SSD controller optimized for cloud computing environments.  

The SF-2481 SSD controller features a number of innovations including increasing the endurance of SSDs built with standard multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash by incorporating nearly twice the normal error correction strength. In addition, it adds improved 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 features of the current second generation SandForce SATA-6Gb/s SSD controllers with DuraClass technology including DuraWrite technology, sequential read and write speeds of up to 500MB/s, random read and write speeds of up to 60 000 I/Os per second, AES encryption equal to 300-bit protection with secure crypto-erase control and so on.

"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. The SF-2481 SSD controller was specifically designed to deliver the perfect combination of performance, endurance, and intelligence required in cloud computing data centers,” said Jeremy Werner, director of marketing for SandForce.

The SF-2481 SSD controller is sampling to OEMs now and will ship in mass production in January 2012.

"As the SSD market matures, architectures are being developed to satisfy the specific needs of various market segments. SandForce is wisely targeting one of the most important SSD markets by tuning a variant of its high-performance SSD controller 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," said Jim Handy, SSD analyst for Objective Analysis.

Tags: SandForce, NAND, Flash, MLC