HGST and NEC Announce PCIe SSD Appliance for Microsoft SQL Server 

Enterprise storage leader HGST and NEC Corporation today announced a PCIe SSD Appliance for Microsoft SQL Server – a performance-driven reference architecture built on NEC Express 5800 scalable enterprise server series and high-performance HGST FlashMAX II PCIe server-mounted flash storage. This appliance not only demonstrates a tremendous boost in performance, but also reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by significantly cutting rack space and power requirements when compared to previous generation solutions.

The PCIe SSD appliance delivers more than twice the compute power of the previous generation 4CPU platform in a single 4U server, reducing rack space requirements by 69 percent and power consumption by 27 percent. The inclusion of HGST's FlashMAX II devices injects up to 8.8TB of high-performance flash per server, for a near doubling of logical scan rates to 8.2GBps that tackles even the largest SQL workloads. With features once only found on mainframe or UNIX servers, this new appliance delivers significant and predicable performance, as well as scalability, to keep pace with the changing demands of today's enterprise data center operations.

"HGST is pleased to work with NEC to provide customers with this validated reference architecture and solution that has proven performance," said Mike Gustafson, senior vice president and general manager, HGST Flash Platforms Group.  "With the need for high-performance being a driving force in data center operations, the FlashMAX II was built from the ground up to provide unconditional and consistent levels of IOPS across a broad range of applications and workloads at all capacity utilization levels."

"NEC is excited about this announcement of the reference architecture combining our Scalable Enterprise Server and HGST FlashMax technology, providing secure and scalable capacity with unmatched performance," said Tomoyasu Nishimura, general manager of NEC IT Platform Division. "We have a proven track record with HGST FlashMAX II technology, and we look forward to bringing this appliance as well as others to the market with a superior value proposition."