The Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces that its 12Gbit/s SAS 15,000 RPM enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs) – the AL13SX Series – and enterprise solid state drives (eSSDs) – PX03SN Series – earned VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 and 5.5 certification for VMware vSphere environments. Virtual SAN for VMware vSphere 6.0 is a new hypervisor-converged storage platform that was released in March to deliver the benefits of software-defined storage to the data center. These eHDDs and eSSDs are optimized for mission-critical tiered enterprise server and storage applications, and all capacity models underwent VMware’s rigorous validation process.

VMware certified drives are validated to take advantage of VMware Virtual SAN benefits including high performance and radically simplified storage deployments in software-defined data centers. The certification involves a five-stage process that included review, performance, reliability, compatibility and overall integrity. With VMware Virtual SAN certification, these Toshiba eHDDs and eSSDs models help to bring the benefits of tiered storage solutions to both SMB and enterprise customers.

“Many customers are using virtualized environments to optimize the performance and utilization of the reliable Toshiba drives they already know and use,” said Scott Wright, director of enterprise HDD marketing, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. “Toshiba is pleased to work with VMware to certify our mission critical eHDDs and eSSDs. This certification of the 12Gbit/s SAS AL13SX Series and 12Gbit/s SAS PX03SN Series provides further assurance that customers may confidently utilize Toshiba enterprise HDDs and SSDs with vSphere 6.0 to optimize the performance and utilization of these important mission critical storage resources.”

The AL13SX Series and PX03SN series is currently available. For more information on Toshiba’s line of industry-leading enterprise SAS SSDs and HDDs, visit http://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/. To connect with Toshiba Storage, visit the corporate blog at http://storage.toshiba.com/corporateblog/