HGST (formerly Hitachi GST and now a Western Digital company) is shipping its NVMe compliant Ultrastar SN100 Series PCIe SSDs, and claims that they are the industry's highest-performing NVMe compliant SSDs. The new HGST PCIe SSDs are a key building block for delivering HGST server-side Flash solutions. In these solutions, the Ultrastar SN100 Series SSDs are combined with HGST server software - specifically, the HGST Flash Software Suite and HGST Device Manager. This combination creates a server-side Flash platform solution that delivers clustering, scalability, high availability and manageability for performance applications. For MySQL, HGST claims that its server-side Flash solutions have delivered up to 40 percent server consolidation with up to 60 percent performance improvement while maintaining existing MySQL architectures.

The Ultrastar SN100 Series delivers 310,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) for mixed read/write workloads that are commonly found in a variety of mission-critical data center applications, including traditional and scale-out databases, virtualization, and big data analytics.

The SSD leverages standard NVMe drivers to take advantage of the benefits of PCIe without requiring vendor-unique drivers. This makes the Ultrastar SN100 Series as easy to deploy as traditional storage devices. The Ultrastar SN100 Series is available in both a low profile half-height, half-length (HH-HL) add-in card (1,600GB, 3,200GB), and a hot-swappable 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF - 800GB, 1,600GB, 3,200GB).

The Ultrastar SN100 Series supports up to 310,000 random mixed read/write IOPS (70/30, 4KB), up to 160,000 random write IOPS (4KB), and up to 743,000 random read IOPS (4KB). Sequential read and write throughput is 3,000 MB/s and 1,600 MB/s, respectively.

The Ultrastar SN150 HH-HL add-in card is shipping now. The 2.5-inch SFF Ultrastar SN100 SSDs will be available in May.