HGST Leads The Expanding Enterprise Flash Storage Market With New Offerings For Application Acceleration

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 4, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- 2014 FLASH MEMORY SUMMIT (Booth #316), – HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), today announced the launch of its new FlashMAX™ III family of PCIe accelerators, which deliver a dramatic improvement in price/performance for today's most demanding database and cloud workloads. Also introduced today is the new HGST ServerCache™ software that allows IT administrators to inject acceleration into their existing storage infrastructure by quickly and easily deploying a hybrid flash environment with any SSD.  

"For businesses to remain competitive, application performance matters. Data needs to be instantly accessible for real-time processing, analytics and insights," said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing, HGST. "To address this need, enterprise customers are actively looking to add flash into their storage infrastructure. Whether focused on peak application acceleration with an all-SSD environment, improving lagging performance by tiering or using caching to leverage combined HDD and flash environments, our new hardware and software solutions help strike that balance among performance, complexity and cost."

HGST's new FlashMAX III PCIe SSD and ServerCache software are suited for performance-intensive applications including databases, SQL servers, data warehouses, big data deployment and video post-production applications. Each address distinct needs for flash storage solutions based on performance, capacity, cost and deployment time requirements.

Key benefits of FlashMAX III PCIe accelerators include:

• New levels of application performance – Built for extreme application performance, FlashMAX III delivers up to 540,000 Random Read IOPS (4K) and up to 200,000 Mixed Sustained Random IOPS (70:30 R:W) from a single half-height, half-length PCIe SSD.
• Dramatic improvements in price/performance – With up to double the price/performance, FlashMAX III offers new levels of value over its prior generation.
• Support for the latest generation of servers – FlashMAX III supports PCI Express 3.0, the latest version of the PCI Express interconnect supported by today's newest server platforms.

Key benefits of ServerCache server software include:

• Increased storage I/O performance – Eliminates storage bottlenecks by creating an SSD cache of the most frequently used data with up to a 10x improvement in performance utilizing any SSD.
• Low cost adoption and simplicity – Delivers high performance with fewer SSDs, with little ongoing monitoring or expense, and absolutely no changes to existing storage infrastructure, applications and backup systems. 
• Compatible with a large variety of block-based storage – Runs on any server application hosted on either a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Direct Attached Storage (DAS) system running Windows Server or Linux.

Driven by accelerated customer demand, and backed by customer endorsed, field-proven technologies as well as HGST's commitment to quality, the new FlashMAX III PCIe SSD delivers leading enterprise-class specifications such as 2M hours MTBF and includes a five-year limited warranty. Along with ServerCache, this product family continues to broaden HGST's flash portfolio. 

FlashMAX III will be available in Q3 2014, and is currently being qualified by select OEMs. ServerCache is available now for a free 30-day live trial download and for purchase at $995 per physical server.

For more information about HGST, visit http://www.hgst.com.

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About HGST
HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), develops innovative, advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world's most valued data. HGST addresses customers' rapidly changing storage needs by delivering intelligent storage devices that tightly integrate hardware and software to maximize solution performance. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, HGST provides high-value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Cloud, Data Center, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. HGST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company's website at http://www.hgst.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to expected demand for certain categories of SSDs and our ability to deliver and availability dates for SSD products. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including changes in markets, demand, technology challenges and limitations, global economic conditions and other risks and uncertainties listed in Western Digital's recent SEC filings, to which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak on as of the date hereof, and HGST/WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

FlashMAX and ServerCache are trademarks of HGST, Inc. and its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.  All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.

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SOURCE HGST, A Western Digital Company