Flash-based storage continues to move from being an expensive niche technology targeted at a few workloads to a more mainstream technology. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the broader availability of products, a growing level of familiarity with the benefits of solid state technologies, and declining prices are all adding to the momentum behind flash-based storage.

To gain end-user insights into how flash-based storage is being adopted, IDC conducted a survey of more than 1,000 storage administrators across the globe as part of its biannual Storage User Demand Study (SUDS). This study provides essential details on current and future deployments of storage systems as well as more forward-looking opinions of end users about emerging technologies or market developments.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, and Super Micro Computer, Inc., today announced that the SanDisk ULLtraDIMM solid state drive (SSD), the industry's first enterprise-class, ultra-low latency, memory-channel connected storage solution, will begin shipping in Supermicro's Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms. Adding flash storage on the memory bus provides Supermicro with a powerful solution to help customers address growing data center application performance requirements without a significant infrastructure investment.

"The ULLtraDIMM SSD was designed to expand the reach of flash storage throughout the data center and scale to meet the requirements of any enterprise application - no matter how bandwidth or capacity intensive," said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "We are very excited to partner with Supermicro in offering this innovative, ultra-low latency storage solution to help their customers accelerate the performance of their cloud, virtualization, HPC and other applications and experience the benefits of a flash-transformed data center."

QNAP Systems, Inc. announced today that Turbo NAS products now support the new WD Red 5/6 TB NAS hard drives and WD Red Pro NAS hard drives. Specifically designed for NAS applications and featuring exclusive NASware 3.0 technology, the new WD Red and WD Red Pro hard drives provide enhanced reliability and performance for NAS applications.

The new WD Red 5/6 TB NAS hard drives are designed for NAS systems with up to 8 drive bays and can easily meet the growing data storage demands of SOHO and home users. The WD Red Pro NAS hard drives are designed to provide affordable, robust and highly-reliable hard drives for medium-to-large-scale business NAS systems with 8-16 drive bays.

PROMISE Technology Inc., a global leader in the storage industry that develops solutions for the cloud/IT, rich media and video surveillance markets, announced today that its Vess storage series supports the new WD Red PRO line of SATA hard drives.

The WD Red PRO line is specifically designed for NAS applications and features NASware 3.0 in addition to a unique vibration sensor design which enables the hard drives to be paired with for example the Vess R2000 to provide an optimized NAS environment experience with impressive reliability for end-users and owners of small and medium-sized business.

PMC, the semiconductor and software solutions innovator transforming networks that connect, move and store big data, today established a new ultra-fast storage class memory tier to accelerate critical applications in scale-out storage and all-flash arrays. The PMC Flashtec NVRAM Drives combine the speed and endurance of DRAM with the persistency of NAND flash to deliver ten times higher performance than the fastest Solid State Drive (SSD), at more than 10 million I/Os per second (IOPS), with sub-microsecond latency.

Leveraging PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0, the Flashtec NVRAM Drives connect directly to the host to optimize CPU utilization and maximize overall system performance. The latest member of PMC's enterprise-class Flashtec portfolio of controllers and drives, the new solutions are based on the industry-standard NVMe interface to enable plug-and-play PCIe connectivity, which decreases time to market in data center and enterprise storage deployments.

Enmotus Inc. announced that it is demonstrating its FuzeDrive hybrid storage software solutions at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA. The product and technology demos highlight the versatility of Enmotus' hybridization technology, which enables high performance, cost effective hybrid storage utilizing storage media such as Flash/HDD and Flash/Flash as well as next generation Storage Class Memory such as NVDIMM.

FuzeDrive targets applications that require high performance such as databases and analytics as well as content delivery solutions. The demonstration can be seen at the Flash Memory Summit, booth 219, taking place in the Santa Clara Convention Center on Aug. 5-7.

As revealed by several store listings Toshiba-owned OCZ Storage Solutions is just about ready to release a new consumer-oriented solid state drive, the ARC 100. Coming in 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB capacities, this SSD features a 2.5-inch form factor (7 mm height), a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, a Barefoot 3 M10 controller, and Toshiba-made 19 nm MLC NAND Flash memory chips.

The ARC 100 drivers are capable of sequential read speeds of 490 MB/s and reach 430 MB/s (400 MB/s for the 120 GB model) while writing. The 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB can be found priced at $74.99, $119.99 and $239.99, respectively, but they are out of stock.

Enterprise storage leader HGST, a Western Digital company, today is previewing a new architecture for solid-state drives (SSDs) that enables applications to provide faster insights to the data-intensive questions of tomorrow. The demonstration shows unprecedented SSD performance levels that are achieved by utilizing a combination of HGST's new, latency-optimized interface protocols with next-generation non-volatile memory components.

The SSD demonstration utilizes a PCIe interface and delivers three million random read IOs per second of 512 bytes each when operating in a queued environment and a random read access latency of 1.5 microseconds (us) in non-queued settings, delivering results that cannot be achieved with existing SSD architectures and NAND Flash memories. This performance is orders of magnitude faster than existing Flash based SSDs, resulting in a new class of block storage devices.

HGST, a Western Digital company, 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."

Lite-On SSD, a global leader in development and manufacturing of high-performance enterprise SSDs, will be attending the Flash Memory Summit, August 5-7, in Santa Clara, California. Lite-On will feature two new enterprise storage solutions - the M.2 PCIe P1P Series and N9S Series 2.5" SATA 6.0 Gb/s SSDs. Both units are designed to address high capacity and high performance needs of hyperscale computing, highly virtualized data centers, and high I/O server operations.

The P1P Series is a M.2 PCIe enterprise solution with capacities of 1 TB and power loss protection circuit all in a small form factor. This series is designed to offer the low latency through the PCIe bus. The small form factor and high capacity allow enterprise customers to pack more storage in a smaller footprint. The P1P Series can deliver sequential read/write speeds of up to 610 MB/s and 520 MB/s, while random read/write speeds can be achieved as high as 95K/15K IOPS.

Connected Data, the creator of the award-winning Drobo line of smart storage solutions, today announces the launch of its Drobo Mini with Solid State Disk (SSD) drives delivering as much as 80% more performance compared to a Mini configured with traditional spinning hard drives. The Drobo Mini is the first portable, rugged and expandable SSD solution ideal for filmmakers, photographers and creative professionals who need to capture and protect data while on location, and safely transport footage and photos back to the studio for post-production.

The Drobo Mini connects via Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 and features four 2.5" SSD drive bays with an mSATA accelerator option in a package that is rugged, compact and portable, weighing less than three pounds. Like all Drobo products, Drobo Mini protects data without user intervention, even in the event of multiple SSD drive failures. If a drive does fail, Drobo Mini automatically repairs itself and returns to a protected state while providing full access to data without performance being affected. Additional security is provided with battery backup that protects against data loss in the event of a sudden power outage ensuring that all data in flight is protected until power is restored.

Power Quotient International Co., Ltd (PQI), the world's leading brand for mobile device storage peripherals, today released its first Apple MFi-certified Lightning Duo USB portable storage drive, the Gmobi iStick. The Gmobi iStick is the only OTG storage device on the market designed exclusively for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It is also the first licensed and quality assured storage peripheral to have passed Apple's rigorous testing standards and user-oriented design requirements.

The Gmobi iStick is the perfect solution to insufficient built-in storage capacity on Apple mobile devices. The Gmobi iStick is equipped with a user-friendly slide switch design: one end is the Lightning interface that allows you to upload or backup data from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, and the other end is a standard USB transmission interface that can be connected to a Mac, PC, or tablet computer. Two-way data transfers between mobile devices and notebook computers can be easily achieved with the Gmobi iStick, including various media such as photos, music, and video. With the Gmobi iStick, backing up data is easy and fast.

OWC expanded its Thunderbolt interface product line with the new ThunderBay 4 professional-grade, 4-bay enclosure with dual Thunderbolt 2 ports and RAID-ready capabilities, perfect for meeting the creative and demanding workflows of users.

Redefining High-Performance & Power in a 4-Bay Enclosure
OWC's ThunderBay 4 offers incredible storage capacity, throughput, and data-redundancy to any Mac or PC with a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 port. Enhance any application, such as A/V post-production, music, graphics, data management and photography, including Time Machine backups by accessing information with sustained data rates up to 1,342 MB/s and capacities up to 20 TB.

Seagate Technology plc today announced a new portfolio of Networked Attached Storage (NAS) solutions specifically designed for today's small businesses. The new portfolio includes five NAS products in a range of capacities from 2 TB to 30 TB and performance perfectly suited for the home office to small businesses with up to 50 employees. The Seagate NAS and NAS Pro lines set the standard for ease-of-use by introducing a new intuitive operating system, NAS OS 4, together with hardware specifically designed for small businesses without dedicated IT resources.

"Storage is a must have for businesses of today regardless of their size or industry. So much of what businesses do is now stored in a digital format, but at the same time storage is an area that may not be top of mind for many small business professionals. The irony is that smart storage is so essential to their growth," said Ramon Ray of SmallBizTechnology. "It is good to see a company like Seagate taking the guess work out of network storage solutions and making it easy to set up and manage for a small business without dedicated IT staff."

OCZ Storage Solutions - a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the introduction and availability of its next generation SQL Server acceleration solution. The new ZD-XL SQL Accelerator 1.5 supports Microsoft SQL Server 2014, 2012 and 2008 R2 versions expanding on the key flash-based storage features that improve I/O access performance. OCZ presents the new SQL accelerator today through July 17th at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2014, Booth #2506A, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC.

ZD-XL SQL Accelerator 1.5 provides optimized and efficient flash acceleration for SQL Server through unique integration with the application and has been enriched over the previous ZD-XL 1.0 version to enable database administrators (DBAs) to unleash the full power of SQL Server 2014 features, such as flash Buffer Pool Extension (BPE) support, so that database pages can be accessed faster by loading them directly from flash.

G-Technology, a leader in delivering premium storage solutions for audio/video production, photography and the creative professional market, will demonstrate new storage solutions, including the new G-RAID with removable drives, and the award-winning Studio Line (G-SPEED Studio and G-RAID Studio) and Evolution Series with the new G-DRIVE ev 220 external storage module.

Whether capturing, transferring, or editing digital content, G-Technology solutions enhance performance, capacity, style and reliability for 2K/4K video, photography and other content creation workflows.

Lexar, a leading global brand of flash memory products, today expanded its Professional Workflow line to include 512 GB and 256 GB USB 3.0 storage drives. Designed for use with the Lexar Professional Workflow Hub, the new Professional Workflow DD512 and DD256 storage drives give photographers and videographers the power to back up images and video files from multiple memory cards at once.

The Professional Workflow DD512 and DD256 offer read transfer speeds up to 450 MB per second and write speeds up to 245 MB per second. Additionally, the drives include an LED capacity meter that allows users to see available storage space at a glance. Designed to enable fast transfer and back up of RAW images, high-res photos, and HD, 3D, and 4K video, the drives can also be removed from the hub and used individually.

OCZ Storage Solutions - a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, will showcase its comprehensive storage portfolio supporting both enterprise and client applications, and will unveil a new Vector Series drive at Computex 2014, Taipei, Taiwan, June 3 through June 6, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Suites 1005-1006.

Building on the leading sustained performance, reliability and endurance of the previous generation, the latest addition to the Vector family includes an advanced feature-set specifically designed for workstations and entry-level servers.

Silicon Power, the world's leading provider of memory storage solutions, today unveils its latest USB 3.0 extra-rugged portable hard drive - Armor A60. Applying the exclusive shockproof and water-resistant materials and the integrated 360 °-covering enclosure design, Armor A60 promises complete data protection against all the hurts that would occur during daily operations. Meanwhile, Armor A60 has passed U.S. military-grade drop test and also acquired international approval of water-resistant ability. In addition, Armor A60 features dashing designs with smooth finish and vivid colors, which appears to be the stylish storage for travelers, sports enthusiasts and businessmen on the go.

Shockproof & Water-resistant - All-round Protection for Any Condition
Inheriting from the military-grade shockproof specialty of Armor series, SP Armor A60 USB 3.0 portable hard drive incorporates the ultra-rugged rubber casing and internal suspension system, which enable perfect buffer effect for all physical impacts and assure rigid protections against crushes, dust and spraying water. In order to utilize its anti-damage capabilities, Armor A60 is engineered with incredibly strong construction that has passed the US military MIL-STD-810G (transit drop test) and IPX4 waterproof level, making itself the toughest data guard for outdoor users. Furthermore, Armor A60 introduces the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface that ensures ultimate ultra-fast data transfer speeds and offers users an extremely effortless and time-saving user experience.

Newer Technology Inc. (NewerTech), a leading developer of Macintosh, PC, iPod, iPhone, and iPad performance upgrades and accessories announced a new 5 TB + 5 TB capacity for the Guardian MAXimus line of dual-bay, high-performance external storage solutions.

High-Performance, Multiple Interfaces
The Guardian MAXimus, available in capacities up to 5 TB + 5 TB, adds tremendous storage capacity and throughput to any Mac or PC with USB 3.0, eSATA, FireWire 800, or FireWire 400. Mission critical applications such as financial records, accounting data, medical files, business projects, and Time Machine backups are enhanced with access to data at sustained data rates up to 238 MB/s read, 245 MB/s write.

Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend ), a worldwide leader in storage and multimedia products, is proud to announce the launch of its JetDrive Lite series of expansion cards aimed at MacBook Pro with Retina display and MacBook Air users. With four different models offered in 64 GB and 128 GB capacities, Transcend's new JetDrive Lite cards are tailor-made to have a flush profile with each specific model while providing an easy way to increase available storage for media.

Seamless Design, Large Storage
With their substantial amount of storage space, Transcend's JetDrive Lite expansion cards provide plenty of space to backup, store, and carry personal documents, photos, movies, and music. The 128 GB card, for instance, can store over 60,000 high-resolution photos, 32,000 MP3 songs, 32 hours of Full HD video, or seemingly limitless number of documents. When inserted into the card slot of a compatible MacBook Pro with Retina display or MacBook Air, the low-profile JetDrive Lite will not stick out like an SD card and can be left in place for on-the-go storage.

FirmTek, LLC, a world-leading developer of external storage solutions, today is announcing and shipping the ThunderTek/PX2+2. A flexible all-in-one Thunderbolt storage solution accommodating two high-speed 2.5" SSD, HDD, or SSHDs internally, the ThunderTek/PX2+2 also provides two external eSATA ports for connecting external direct-connect and port-multiplier eSATA enclosures.

"Thunderbolt delivers unparalleled performance, flexibility and simplicity to personal computing." said Jason Ziller, Intel's director of Thunderbolt Marketing, "Products like the FirmTek ThunderTek/PX2+2 help highlight what Thunderbolt makes possible." Transfer HD movies in less than 30 seconds or backup a terabyte of content in less than 10 minutes. All of this is possible with Thunderbolt.

Sonnet Technologies today announced the launch of the Fusion QR, a compact and portable four-drive RAID 5 SATA storage system. The Fusion QR replaces the company's Fusion D400QR5, which also offered reliable and affordable RAID 5 storage. Like the legacy system, the Fusion QR integrates a high-performance RAID 5 controller for maximum versatility, critical data protection, and added value, and offers a flexible quad interface that includes eSATA, dual FireWire 800, and USB 3.0.

"With the Fusion QR, we took everything that pros loved about the D400QR5 and made it lighter, more portable, and more affordable than ever. It is a great solution for on-location or mobile productions that require a reliable and versatile four-drive SATA storage in a compact package," said Robert Farnsworth, Sonnet CEO.

Diablo Technologies today announced that it will present on Memory Channel Storage (MCS) at EMC World 2014 in Las Vegas. Experts at Diablo will demonstrate the performance of MCS-based devices for virtualized environments in the VMware Theatre on May 7 at 4:15 p.m. PDT.

According to TechNavio, the global enterprise server virtualization market will grow 32 percent over the period 2010-2014. With the increasing adoption of virtualized computing, the need for higher I/O throughput and capacity has reached an important turning point. Traditionally, storage architectures have been unable to leverage the vast processing capabilities of modern CPUs. As a result, the number of virtual machines (VMs) that can be serviced on a single physical server is limited by the properties of pre-existing storage solutions. By leveraging the parallelism of the memory subsystem, Diablo's MCS technology enables ultra-low response times to VMs while simultaneously servicing heavy I/O workloads.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac upgrade and storage technology company, announced the new 25% larger capacity for the Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 RAID storage solution for enterprise, professional and prosumer users. The Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 combines multiple high speed interfaces and hardware RAID with massive capacity to handle demanding 4K video content, in a four-bay professional-grade storage solution. With high-speed sustained data rates of up to 260 MB/s, the Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 is ideal for creative professionals using USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or eSATA equipped Macs or PCs, including the Mac Pro 2013.

The Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 features user selectable options of Hardware RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, Span, and Independent modes, offering the discerning user the ideal combination of speed, capacity, and redundancy to handle demanding applications.