February 27, 2019 -Toshiba Memory Corporation, today announces that the newly released PM5 Series of 12Gb/s enterprise SAS SSDs has earned VMware vSAN™ 6.7 certification, enabling these flash-based storage devices to be shared across connected hosts in a VMware vSphere® cluster.  With vSAN 6.7 certification, users can pool PM5 Series SSDs together in a single, distributed, shared data store.  This enables users to define the storage capabilities required (such as performance, capacity and availability) for each connected virtual machine (VM) within the VMware vSAN cluster.  These capabilities not only further hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) options in virtual environments, but also ensures that storage policies are administered and maintained within the PM5 Series with the utmost vSAN compatibility.

The certification of the PM5 Series enables VMware vSAN support for both hybrid and all-flash configurations using a two-tier storage architecture (capacity tier and cache tier).  All write operations are sent to the cache tier and are subsequently de-staged to the capacity tier over time.  When a PM5 Series SSD is deployed within a hybrid configuration, its cache tier is used as both a read and write cache, keeping hot data to improve performance.  In an all-flash configuration, 100 percent of the cache tier is used for the write buffer.  Given the benefits of tiered storage, PM5 Series SSDs are capable of meeting the demanding requirements of both enterprise and data center customers.

Built with Toshiba Memory Corporation’s 64-layer BiCS FLASH™ TLC (3-bit-per-cell) 3D flash memory, the PM5 Series offers up to 15.36TB1 capacities in a 2.5-inch form factor, and supports a full range of endurance and capacity ranges.  It also utilizes the industry’s first2 MultiLink SAS™ architecture that delivers the fastest3 SAS SSD sequential performance to date4.  In addition, PM5 Series SSDs support multi-stream write technology – a feature that intelligently manages and groups data types together to minimize write amplification and garbage collection, which in turn, translates into reduced latency, improved endurance, increased performance and better Quality of Service (QoS).

“We are pleased to be collaborating closely with Toshiba Memory America to jointly certify flash innovations for the fast-growing hyper-converged infrastructure market,” said Lee Caswell, vice president products, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware.  “Now that database applications represent the top workload for VMware vSAN, flash performance, such as the jointly certified Toshiba Memory PM5 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, is critical for customers looking for proven compatibility and interoperability.”

The PM5 Series of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs with VMware vSAN 6.7 and VMware ESXi™ 6.7 certification is shipping today from Toshiba Memory America, Inc. and includes customized server OEM models also approved for vSAN all-flash capacity tier, all-flash caching tier and hybrid caching tier implementations.