Press release

Toshiba Memory Announces the Availability of RM5 Value SAS SSDs in HPE ProLiant Servers

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Toshiba
Memory America, Inc. (TMA)
, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba
Memory Corporation, today announced the availability of its RM5 Series
of value SAS (vSAS) SSDs on HPE ProLiant servers. Toshiba Memory is the
first to introduce vSAS – a new class of SSD that is expected to replace
enterprise SATA SSDs in most server applications. Value SAS SSDs deliver
advancements in performance, capacity, manageability, reliability, and
data security at very comparable price points. RM5 SSDs are
single-ported versions of Toshiba Memory’s robust enterprise SAS product
family and provide higher performance per slot than competing SATA SSDs,
thus enabling better utilization of system resources under I/O intensive
workloads.

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RM5 SSDs are single-ported versions of Toshiba Memory's robust enterprise SAS product family and pro ...

RM5 SSDs are single-ported versions of Toshiba Memory’s robust enterprise SAS product family and provide higher performance per slot than competing SATA SSDs. (Photo: Business Wire)

Since the SATA interface is performance-limited, no future advancements
are planned on its roadmap. In many data-intensive environments, SSDs
based on SATA have become a bottleneck to servers, preventing the CPU
from performing required operations or transactions in a timely manner.
This underutilization of the server’s compute capabilities can also
affect the number of users that can be serviced at one time. Because
SATA was designed as a lower cost interface for consumer-grade hard
drives, its 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, half-duplex
transmission, limited queue depths, and restrictive protocol means that
it cannot leverage the full capabilities of flash memory.

The RM5 Series delivers twice the interface speed of SATA, with
full-duplex 12Gb/s links. The drives utilize cutting-edge 64-layer BiCS
FLASH™ TLC (3-bit-per-cell) 3D flash memory developed by Toshiba Memory
Corporation. Available capacities range from 960 gigabytes (GB) to
7,680GB1. The products support superior bandwidth and
Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) than SATA, including
sequential reads up to 838 megabytes per second (MB/s), sequential
writes up to 650MB/s, random reads up to 150,000 IOPS, and random writes
up to 50,000 IOPS2. Compared to typical enterprise SATA SSDs,
the RM5 Series is about 2x faster under mixed read/write workloads3.

“In our system-level OLTP benchmarking4, RM5 SSDs deliver 25
percent higher application-level performance at up to 85 percent lower
transactional latency than SATA SSDs,” said Jeremy Werner, senior vice
president and general manager, SSD business unit, Toshiba Memory
America, Inc. “By replacing SATA drives with vSAS drives in servers, HPE
customers can realize significantly improved system-level performance
per dollar.”

“We are committed to improving application performance for our customers
and with the HPE ProLiant servers, we are delivering secure, software
defined compute that delivers the speed, scale and economics needed for
hybrid cloud deployments,” said Shin-Wen Kuo, vice president of
Workloads and Server Options at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
“Through our collaboration with Toshiba Memory to integrate its SAS
server storage solution with HPE ProLiant servers, we are enabling
customers to upgrade from SATA to SAS performance at an affordable price
point while leveraging their existing server infrastructure.”

Providing high data security and reliability, the RM5 Series offers full
FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification and supports various levels of security
features including Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) and Sanitize Instant
Erase (SIE) configurations. These value SAS SSDs are directly compatible
with most sockets that SATA SSDs are used in today, making them
especially valuable to enable hardware-based RAID configurations. Since
the majority of ProLiant servers include a SAS host bus adapter (HBA) or
RAID card, SAS and SATA SSDs can be used in the same drive bay, making
it a seamless performance upgrade.

The RM5 Series of value SAS SSDs is now available in HPE ProLiant
servers and is priced to compete with enterprise SATA SSDs – at a lower
cost than mainstream SAS SSDs. For more information regarding pricing
and availability, contact your local HPE ProLiant sales representative
or visit https://us.toshiba-memory.com/life-after-sata.

About Toshiba Memory America, Inc.

Toshiba Memory America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Toshiba
Memory Corporation
, a leading worldwide supplier of flash
memory
and solid
state drives (SSDs)
. From the invention of flash memory to today’s
breakthrough 96-layer BiCS FLASH™ 3D technology, Toshiba continues to
lead innovation and move the industry forward. For more information on
Toshiba Memory, please visit business.toshiba-memory.com
and follow us on social
media
.

© 2019 Toshiba Memory America, Inc. All rights reserved. Information in
this press release, including product pricing and specifications,
content of services, and contact information is current and believed to
be accurate on the date of the announcement, but is subject to change
without prior notice. Technical and application information contained
here is subject to the most recent applicable Toshiba product
specifications.

Notes:

All trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their
respective companies.

1 Definition of capacity: Toshiba Memory Corporation defines
a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000
bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer
operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2
for the definition of 1GB = 230 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes,
1TB = 240 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows
less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of
various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings,
software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software
applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.

2 Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device,
read and write conditions, and file size.

3 RM5 SSD performance is 105,000 IOPS using a mixed use
workload of 70 percent read operations and 30 percent write operations
at 4KB block sizes. Enterprise SATA SSD performance is based on Micron
5200 Pro publicly available product specifications using a mixed use
workload of 70 percent read operations and 30 percent write operations
at 4KB block sizes. The mixed workload performance was 53,000 to 57,000
IOPS. As such, RM5 SSDs are about 2x faster under mixed read/write
workloads.

4 System-level OLTP benchmarking conducted by Toshiba Memory
America included RM5 Series SSDs (960GB capacities) and enterprise SATA
SSDS (960GB capacities), in an emulated OLTP environment. Results were
based on three runs that tested average transactions per minute (tpm)
and overall disk latency (microseconds). Read and write speed may vary,
as well as latency, depending on the host device, read and write
conditions, and benchmark programs. Toshiba Memory defines a megabyte
(MB) as 1,000,000 bytes and a kibibyte (KiB) as 210 bytes, or
1,024 bytes. Sequential read and write performance, and latency,
mentioned herein are reference data, and may vary from the RM5 product
data in the datasheet.