SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced that its SAS enterprise solid state drives (SSDs), available in Dell PowerEdge^® R720 and PowerEdge^® T620 servers, have been certified by VMware as a supported flash tier of VMware Virtual SAN™. VMware Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier that clusters server direct-attached hard disk drives (HDDs) and SSDs to create a highly resilient shared storage solution optimized for virtual machines.

“Dell PowerEdge servers are designed to handle the most demanding workloads with superb stability, efficiency and long-term value, and the SSDs included in these solutions are a key element to that performance,” said Brian Payne, executive director of server solutions, Dell. “The combined solution of SanDisk SSDs within the Dell PowerEdge R720 and PowerEdge T620 servers provide a strong platform for VMware Virtual SAN.”

VMware Virtual SAN is an innovative software solution that extends the hypervisor to pool both compute and storage, creating a highly efficient software-defined converged infrastructure. VMware Virtual SAN is seamlessly integrated with VMware vSphere^® and implements a scale-out, highly available architecture with built-in read/write caching on SSDs for high performance. SanDisk SSDs are designed to work seamlessly with VMware Virtual SAN, providing enterprise performance equivalent to traditional storage with lower capital and operating expenses significantly reducing total cost of ownership.

The inclusion of SanDisk enterprise SAS SSDs enables performance and scalability, all while minimizing IO storage latency for read and write operations. The combination of SanDisk SSDs with Dell servers is a strong solution to run VMware Virtual SAN, and allows customers to fully leverage its built-in caching and high resiliency capabilities to minimize storage latency, while preventing data loss in the event of disk, host or network failures.

“VMware Virtual SAN is designed to provide a simple and resilient tier of storage for virtual machines,” said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, SDDC Suite Business Unit, VMware. “SanDisk’s SAS SSDs with VMware Virtual SAN can provide our joint customers with a high-performance and cost-effective storage solution.”

SanDisk SSDs are available in a 2.5-inch standard form factor with capacities ranging from 200GB to 1600GB. These drives are designed to integrate seamlessly into existing SAS enterprise storage and server systems without the need for modifications to existing applications, operating systems or infrastructure. For real-world workloads, SanDisk drives maintain very low response times under the heaviest of workloads. This enables system designers to build high-performance RAID storage solutions with multi-terabyte capacities using fewer drives.

“SanDisk’s breadth of enterprise storage offerings center around high performance, reliability and endurance, and the certification of our SSDs in Dell PowerEdge R720 and T620 servers for VMware VSAN is a testament to that quality assurance,” said Steve Fingerhut, vice president of marketing, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions. “Leveraging this new virtualized platform, enterprise customers can take advantage of these powerful hardware and software solutions to enhance existing data center infrastructures.”

For additional information about SanDisk Enterprise SSDs, please visit http://www.sandisk.com/products/ssd/sas/. For details about the new VMware VSAN technology platform, go to http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san/.