Dell and Toshiba have teamed to provide data centers with high performance serial attached SCSI-based (SAS) servers.
By combining Toshiba’s PX04S series enterprise SSDs with Dell’s PowerEdge PowerEdge servers, the companies set a new performance benchmark for SAS-based servers from the Round Rock, Texas-based IT giant. A PowerEdge R730 server with a single PX04S SSDs can achieve a performance rating of 340,000 random read input/output operations per second (IOPS), the companies claimed.
Based on Toshiba’s own NAND flash technology and controllers, the MLC-based PX04S SSDs with 12 gigabit per second interfaces are available in a variety of capacities, ranging from 480 gigabytes (GB) to 4 terabytes (TB). SSDs with model numbers starting with PX04SLQ and PX04SRQ provide additional data security safeguards with a self-encrypting drive option.
“With the fastest random read SAS SSDs available, Toshiba’s PX04S SSDs offer excellent performance and value for Dell PowerEdge server customers,” said Brian Payne, executive director of Dell PowerEdge product management, in a Feb. 17 announcement. “Toshiba has been a long-time and trusted supplier to Dell for SAS SSDs.”
The announcement arrived nearly a month after Toshiba took the wraps off its new PX04SL series of “very read-intensive” SAS SSDs for media streaming, data warehousing and Web hosting environments.
Available in 2 TB and 4 TB capacities, PX04SL SSDs provide sustained random read performance of 270,000 IOPS, according to the SSD maker. “The PX04SL joins our exceptional third generation of SAS SSDs and leverages Toshiba’s vertical integration and leadership strengths in the growing SSD market,” said Jeremy Werner, vice president of SSD and storage solutions marketing at Toshiba, in a statement.
Over the past few years, Toshiba has been steadily carving out its share of the expanding market for flash-based enterprise storage.
In 2013, the company snapped up OCZ, a struggling SAS SSD maker and provider of application-accelerating PCIe SSDs. Last year, as a subsidiary of Toshiba, OCZ announced it had partnered with Levyx, an Irvine, Calif.-based software company, to enable high-performance big data processing on commodity hardware using SSDs.
In October, OCZ debuted its Saber 1000 HMS series of SATA-based host-managed enterprise SSDs. Targeting software-defined data centers, Oded Ilan, general manager of OCZ’s Research and Development unit, said the new drives, “together with a software library and API, enable for the first time software orchestration of internal housekeeping tasks across large pools of SSDs, thus overcoming performance barriers that were simply not possible to address without this technology,” in a statement at the time.