Intel shows off first SSDs using 3D Nand flash technology

High-performance flash drives intended for cloud and heavyweight enterprise applications

Intel has unveiled a line-up of new enterprise SSDs, including the first models based on the company's 3D Nand flash technology, and the first to feature a dual-port PCI Express (PCIe) host interface for high availability.

The new SSDs were announced at Intel's Cloud Day event, and are optimised for the latest Xeon E5-2600 V4 family of processors, also unveiled today. They are intended for cloud and enterprise workloads that call for fast and dependable access to data, according to the firm.

There are four new drives: the DC P3320 and DC P3520 are labelled as cloud-focused models, while the DC D3700 and DC D3600 target enterprise customers needing redundancy and failover capabilities.

All four make use of the Non Volatile Memory Express standard to connect to the host system via the speedy PCIe bus.

The DC P3320 and DC P3520 are described as Intel's first SSDs based on the 3D Nand chip technology unveiled last year, and offer a new level of price and performance compared with previous Intel SSDs, according to the firm.

"We're excited about the density that the P3320 offers, but we're pleased to announce that it delivers up to 3.2 times faster sequential reads versus Sata. Most impressively, it is price equivalent to Sata," said Lisa Spelman, Intel vice president and general manager for Xeon products and data centre marketing.

The drive is available in a 2.5in form factor or as a PCIe 3.0 half-height half-length add-in card, with capacities of 450GB, 1.2TB and 2TB.

Meanwhile, the DC D3700 and DC D3600 are Intel's first dual-port PCIe SSDs, providing redundancy and failover support via a dual-port host interface design.

"This is optimised for mission-critical enterprise workloads and scale-up storage that's currently bottlenecked by SAS drives. We've added active/active dual-port PCIe to break this storage bottleneck and deliver continued performance even in the event of a storage controller failure," said Spelman.

She claimed that the DC D3700 offers up to six times faster response times and six times more input/output operations per second than SAS SSD arrays, making them an ideal choice to meet the growing demand for all-flash storage arrays in enterprise data centres.

The DC D3700 is available in capacities of 800GB and 1.6TB, while the DC D3600 is available in 1TB and 2TB.