14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen that SanDisk has begun production of 19nm chips, but there are some products at its Computex 2012 booth that cater to more immediate concerns.
The company's exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan covers all its business avenues, but we are only going to look at one right now: enterprise storage.
SanDisk has revealed the Lightning SSA cards, where SSA stands for solid-state accelerator.
They utilize an advanced controller with a parallel processing architecture, which enables it to access data without need for DRAM help or much aid on the part of the CPU.
Also, they need PCI Express 2.0 x4 slots and can enable 50 microsecond read and write latency. Read speed is 425 MB/s, Total IOPS (512b Read) rating is 110,000 IOPS and random read/write 4K/8K ratings are 23,000 / 17,000 IOPS.
Capacity-wise, SanDisk will soon ship 200 GB (LP 206M) and 400GB (LP406M) PCI Express cards, in North America.
In that order, the prices are of $1,350 / 1,070 Euro and $2,350 / 1,869 Euro, respectively.
"SanDisk PCIe SSAs deliver balanced performance, speeding access to critical data in a simple and cost-effective way," said Greg Goelz, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions at SanDisk.
"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."
SanDisk's Lightning PCI Express SSAs have power consumption of 15W. Up to five of them can work in tandem inside a single computing system.
Buyers can use them for fast storage or even caching, on Windows, through the SanDisk FlashSoft data caching software.
Finally, the drives are bootable and use industry-standard drivers in Microsoft Windows, Linux and VMWare ESX environments.
"The new Lightning Enterprise PCIe solid state accelerators from SanDisk provide us with the application acceleration we need to create more efficient workflows for a fraction of the cost of previously deployed solutions," said Ramy Katrib, founder and CEO of DigitalFilm Tree.