SandForce Intros SSD Processor Optimized for Cloud
Next month SandForce plans to ship an SSD processor that's optimized for the cloud.
On Monday, SandForce announced the upcoming launch of its first SSD processor (or controller chip) optimized for cloud computing environments, the SF-2481. The company said the new chip increases the endurance of SSDs built with standard MLC flash by incorporating nearly twice the normal error correction strength. It also has improved Predictive Failure Analysis capability and Media Health Tests for reliability.
"As the SSD market matures, architectures are being developed to satisfy the specific needs of various market segments," said Jim Handy, SSD analyst for Objective Analysis. "SandForce is wisely targeting one of the most important SSD markets by tuning a variant of its high-performance SSD Processor 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."
As with the current second generation SandForce SATA 6 Gb/s SSD Processors, the new processor provides balanced sequential read and write speeds of up to 500 MB/s, and balanced random read and write speeds of up to 60,000 I/Os per second. There's also automatic double AES encryption equal to 300-bit protection with Secure Crypto-Erase control, enterprise-level SMART attributes, and over-provisioning that can be customized by the user.
"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," said Jeremy Werner, Director of Marketing for SandForce. "The SF-2481 SSD Processor was specifically designed to deliver the perfect combination of performance, endurance, and intelligence required in cloud computing data centers."
SandForce is currently sampling the SF-2481 SSD controller to OEMS, but there are plans to ship in mass production in January 2012 -- just before SandForce is incorporated into the new parent company, LSI Corporation, in Q1 2012.

Only because you a$$es made HDD prices skyrocket.
The "cloud" servers aren't going to be having one person accessing them at a time. I needs to be able to quickly retrieve data from hundreds/thousands of users. The fast random access of SSDs help this tremendously.
Get off your high horse. The world doesn't owe you a cheap hard drive.
This.
Optimized for "cloud"............... talk about using buzzwords on the hapless fools that don't know any better.....
Anyways.......
It appears what we have here is they are attempting to build an SSD that has increased endurance...
in the cloud or enterprise, you could have 1 person up to a few hundred accessing the same drive. the io ops are more than enough, speed, as in mbps may not be necessary for one person, but the io to handle many at once is definatly needed.
no but i do believe hdd manufactures owe us a BIG appoplogy, should come out, and tell us the whole sale price of every drive, so we know who is screwing us the hardest, as hdd manufactures said only a 10% increase in margins, but we are seeing 150%+ price increase.
i mean its not our fault that they all went to a flood prone area of the world, and than when a flood bigger than they thought would happen, we get screwed. i WANT AT LEAST an apology.
dont know how to edit or if its possible so sorry for the quick succession
they all located in 1 country, and in a flood prone country, in effect they caused the shortage because they are short sighted
Correct, Web Applications benefit greatly with extremely quick read time. Write time is a different issue as typically you do not write back to the application in production use. Updates typically happen on the databases. This site more than likely uses either SSD's or high rpm SAS drives in Raid10 on their servers so that the reads are extremely fast to service the number of get's they get from people simultaneously navigating this site.
On my web servers I actually use whole page caching with the cache and temporary file folder mounting in a ram drive precisely for performance reasons. Works pretty good thus far.
Thanks TH for wasting my time with a dumbass title.