Western Digital’s HGST launched what it claims is the industry’s fastest and most advanced enterprise-class, multi-level cell (MLC) SAS SSD family – the Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR.
Designed specifically for very demanding applications such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming and big data analytics, HGST’s new 12Gb/s SAS SSDs help increase input/output per second (IOPS) and improve response times to mission-critical data in cloud and traditional IT datacenters environments.

Increasingly in traditional IT and cloud hyperscale datacenters an application’s high-end processing functions are stored on SSDs, which are then paired with high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) that store the bulk of that application’s less dynamic content in tiered infrastructures. This mix of high-performance SSDs and high-performance and high-capacity enterprise-class HDDs deliver greater efficiencies of scale, improved asset utilization and help lower total cost of ownership.

Enterprise-class SAS SSDs and HDDs are the preferred solution by datacenter architects who have ruled out client-level SATA SSDs and desktop-class HDD combinations, which may deliver a lower price; but also can result in lower system uptimes. Likewise, putting all types of data on a high-end PCIe only infrastructure is prohibitively expensive.

According to Jeff Janukowicz, research director for SSD and Enabling Technologies at IDC, “SSDs along with high-performance and high-capacity HDDs are the main building blocks of choice for traditional IT and cloud hyperscale datacenters and represent a market that is expected to grow in excess of $16 billion by 2015. SSDs, such as HGST's new SAS SSD family, continue to improve generation to generation to meet today’s enterprise workload requirements while driving down the price points to support high I/O applications.”

On paper, the new Ultrastar SSD800MH 12Gb/s SAS SSD will deliver sequential throughput of up to 1,200MB/s large block reads, and up to 750MB/s writes. It will also deliver up to 145,000 read and 100,000 write IOPS, reaching speeds >100 times faster than HDDs, allowing rapid access to “hot” enterprise data for improved productivity and operational efficiency.

With this new generation, HGST has also improved its SSD “quality of service.” Quality of service refers to how quickly and efficiently the SSD can manage and process reads and writes to the drive. Like lanes on a highway, too much data traffic can cause congestion and slow performance. In tier 0/1 enterprise applications such as high-frequency trading, every millisecond counts. HGST used a unique firmware and controller technology to improve command completion time requirements. The overall result is a 50 percent improvement in latency, a 300 percent improvement in I/O per second (IOPS) writes, and a 2x – 3x faster throughput compared to the earlier generation Ultrastar SSD400S SSD.

Earlier SSD designs fail to meet endurance typically associated with 24x7 data center operations – which play well to the strengths of traditional HDDs. HGST’s new SSD family comes with three endurance levels – high endurance, mainstream endurance and read-intensive endurance. Each 12Gb/s SAS SSD family delivers an optimal balance of performance, reliability, cost and endurance to meet the unique and diverse workload requirements of nearly any enterprise application. The new Ultrastar SSD800MH high-endurance SSD rates at 25 full drive writes per day (DW/D) for five years, ideal for high-frequency trading or online transaction processing. The Ultrastar SSD800MM mainstream endurance SSD rates at 10 DW/D for five years, ideal for applications such as online gaming, big data, and cloud computing. The read-intensive 1TB Ultrastar SSD1000MR SSD rates at two DW/D for five years, perfect for streaming audio/video, cloud computing and other Internet applications.