Seagate announced today at the Flash Memory Summit conference two new flash innovations that extend the limits of storage computing performance in enterprise data centers. The new products include a 60 terabyte (TB) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid-state-drive (SSD) - the largest SSD ever demonstrated - and the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD.

The 60TB SAS SSD features twice the density and four times the capacity of the next highest-capacity SSD available today - equivalent to the capacity needed to accommodate 400 million photos on a typical social media platform, or 12,000 DVD movies. Seagate says that this single controller architecture also delivers the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.

The 60TB SAS SSD also simplifies the configuration process of accommodating "hot" and "cold" data, enabling data centers to use the same enterprise HDD 3.5 inch storage form factor. And, because of the drive’s flexible architecture, this provides a pathway for data centers to easily grow from the current 60TB capacity to accommodate 100TB of data or more in the future - and all in the same form factor.

Similarly, the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD can accommodate the hyperscale needs of today’s data centers seeking to grow with their data without losing the ability to quickly access and process it - a scenario commonly seen in applications involving high performance computing, scale-out databases and big data analytics, such as scientific research and weather modeling. It features a single PCIe interface for high-speed data transfers and four separate controllers, providing processing power up to four times faster than comparable drives, but without the higher cost, power levels and latency required from a PCIe switch or bridge. Additionally, the technology easily integrates into all-flash system arrays.

The 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD will be available through in calendar Q4, 2016. Future availability of the 60TB SAS SSD, currently a demonstration technology, is anticipated for some time in 2017.