Intel and Hitachi to push enterprise SSD boundaries
by Stevie Smith - Dec 3 2008, 13:00
Hitachi joins with Intel to develop new SSDs for enterprise arena. Image: Hitachi GST.
The march of solid state drive (SSD) storage continues this week after American chipmaker Intel Corporation announced a partnership with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies that will see the two tech giants working exclusively to develop far-reaching SSDs for servers and workstations. According to Santa Clara-based Intel, the combination of a leading Enterprise drive supplier with a NAND technology and manufacturing leader will help produce "world-class solutions" that enhance reliability, performance and system compatibility. "The new solid-state drives for [sic] enterprise include a number of architectural breakthroughs and improve performance and energy usage models that will change enterprise computing," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager of Intel's NAND Solutions Group. "Intel and Hitachi GST share a common objective in delivering SAS/FC products based on solid-state technology that will help enterprise customers meet the skyrocketing demands for performance while reducing space, power and cooling costs." In order to achieve that goal, Intel and Hitachi will be working to deliver Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) solid state drives into the enterprise sector, with the first market-ready products expected to arrive in the first half of 2010. The new drives will not be aimed at conventional technology consumers but for business customers that require enterprise-class SSD storage solutions best suited for environments that require extremely high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) performance and power efficiency. Built on Intel's NAND flash memory and SSD technology, the new drives will be Hitachi GST-branded and will also draw upon Hitachi's expertise in drive firmware, reliability, qualification and system integration. While an exclusive partnership, any ensuing SSD creations will exist outside of both Intel's and Hitachi's existing lines of HDD and SSD products.
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