HGST, a Western Digital Company, announced it is shipping its new NVMe Ultrastar SN100 Series PCIe SSDs. The SN100 Series is designed for cloud, hyperscale and enterprise mission-critical workloads. The SSDs can work in tandem with the HGST Flash Software Suite and HGST Device Manager to provide clustering, scalability, high availability and manageability for server-side flash architectures.
The Ultrastar Series is broken into two categories: The SN150 comes in an HHHL (Half Height Half Length) form factor in 1.6 TB and 3.2 TB capacities. The hot-swappable SN100 comes in a 2.5″ form factor with a 15 mm Z-height and the same 1.6 TB and 3.2 TB capacities, but it adds a smaller 800 GB capacity point, as well. Both SSDs communicate via a PCIe 3.0 x4 connection.
Many integrators prefer the 2.5″ variants due to the easy serviceability characteristics, and the fact that there are only two competing 2.5″ NVMe SSDs on the market. The Intel DC P3700 provides up to 2 TB of capacity in the 2.5″ form factor, and the Samsung XS1715 offers 1.6 TB. This gives the SN100 a clear density advantage with 3.2 TB.
Both the SN100 and SN150 share the same top-end performance specifications for the 1.6 TB and 3.2 TB models. The SSDs offer 310,000 IOPS with a mixed 70/30 read/write workload. Random read/write IOPS weigh in at 743,000/160,000, respectively, and sequential speeds are 3,000/1,600 MBps read/write. The 800 GB SN100 has slightly lower performance specifications, indicated in the chart below.
The Ultrastar SN100 Series offers the expected data protection features of an enterprise-class SSD, such as power fail protection, end-to-end data protection, flash-aware RAID, advanced ECC, advanced power management, and a 2 million hour MTBF. The SN100 Series offers up to 3 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) of endurance for the five-year warranty period. Power weighs in at 25/8 watts active/idle, which is within the standard power envelope of a PCIe slot.
The Ultrastar SN100 Series comes from HGST’s sTec acquisition, and the company also has a refresh pending for the FlashMax Series from its Virident acquisition. The FlashMax series employs a proprietary driver stack, and the Ultrastar line offers NVMe. One of the incentives to utilize NVMe is the plug-and-play ability with the standardized whitebox drivers.
“With our new Ultrastar SN100 Series, HGST is helping today’s data center professionals meet one of their most important and difficult storage challenges: deliver extremely high application performance in a cost-effective manner,” said Mike Gustafson, senior vice president and general manager, HGST Flash Platforms Group. “By standardizing the deployment process with NVMe, IT organizations can now realize unprecedented gains in terms of application performance, server consolidation, and simplified setup and management in Linux, Windows and virtualized environments. This milestone is important as it allows customers to easily implement high-capacity PCIe SSDs at scale in a variety of data center environments.”
Support for NVMe is expanding rapidly, but servers still require a compatible operating system and UEFI BIOS. The SN100 Series supports booting in UEFI environments and Linux RHEL 6/7, SLES 12, CentOS 6/7, Open SUSE 12, Windows Microsoft Server 2008 R2, Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 Server.
The Ultrastar SN150 is shipping now, and the SN100 will be available next month. We expect samples in the lab soon. In the meantime, head over to our latest competitive performance analysis of leading PCIe SSDs.
