SanDisk Corp. this week introduced Lightning PCI Express solid state accelerator (SSA) cards designed to boost the performance of workstations and servers used in data centers, server farms and cloud computing environments.

San Disk Lightning SSAs are available as PCI Express 2.0 x4 add-in cards in 200GB and 400GB capacities. These SSAs are designed to accelerate the performance of business-critical applications and can be added to workstations and servers to provide balanced, predictable performance for enterprise applications, delivering a combination of speed, reliability and cost-savings. The cards provide rapid access to the most frequently used data and applications in order to more effectively manage heavy workloads.

The new PCIe cards from SanDisk deliver as low as 50 microsecond sustained read and write latency. Lightning PCIe products offer 245 microsecond average response times and sub-30 millisecond maximum response times reflecting dramatic performance gains in real-world applications running heavy workloads.

The new PCIe products from SanDisk address a wide variety of uses - from financial institutions analyzing and processing massive amounts of information around the clock; to social media and website providers whose customers demand a nearly instant response with every click of a mouse; to media content creators editing high-definition videos.

"SanDisk PCIe SSAs deliver balanced performance, speeding access to critical data in a simple and cost-effective way. Enterprise businesses can now leverage a PCIe acceleration solution that combines SanDisk's leading NAND flash memory technology and its innovative controller design to offer the enterprise-grade reliability and scalability that our customers depend on," said Greg Goelz, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions at SanDisk.

Lightning PCIe SSAs offer SanDisk's proven enterprise SSD technology and feature an advanced controller using a parallel processing architecture to manage essential data protection and input/output (I/O) functions. This results in balanced performance as data is accessed, with little impact on central processor (CPU) loading and no need for additional DRAM memory.

The Lightning PCIe SSAs feature 15W power requirements and include an industry-standard driver integrated for use with major Microsoft Windows, Linux and VMWare ESX environments to avoid additional software or system modification. Up to five PCIe SSD Lightning cards can be added to almost any computing system to deliver a simple, quick solution for performance acceleration.

A caching option is available for Windows operating systems by using SanDisk FlashSoft data caching software, which can be purchased separately. Data centers can support large server workloads by combining the Lightning PCIe SSA as an additional storage tier in conjunction with SanDisk FlashSoft data caching software.

Lightning Enterprise PCIe SSAs are bootable devices which support multiple Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs).

SanDisk Lightning PCIe Enterprise SSAs will be available for purchase in 200GB (LP 206M) and 400GB (LP406M) capacities for $1350 and $2350 MSRP respectively at select authorized retailers in North America.

Tags: SanDisk, Lightning, SSD, NAND, Flash