Intel- a storage giant soon

[dwarakesh]

Microprocessor major Intel on Friday evening announced it has started shipping out its fastest solid-state flash drives - the X-25E Extreme Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) - targeted at servers, workstations and storage devices.

Unlike mechanical hard disk drives, the solid-state drives (SSDs) do not contain any moving parts and instead feature 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. They are more expensive, but faster and efficient.

Interestingly, Intel stressed that the systems equipped with these drives typically do not suffer from the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional drives. "By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times," Intel's statement claimed. The SSD business will obviously pitchfork Intel into direct competition with established HDD-based storage players for businesses like data centres on one hand, and for workstations and devices on the other.

Given the migration towards ultra-portability in laptops, flash drives are ideally suited to this form factor and is beginning to be preferred over spinning hard drives in some other devices as a more reliable storage solution. However, Intel's new flash drive comes in a 32GB capacity, and is priced at $695 for customers who buy at least 1,000 pieces, thus making it quite an expensive proposition.

A 64GB drive is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2009. Intel had earlier announced 80GB and 160GB flash drives for laptop and desktop computers.

Intel had entered a tie-up with Micron Technology a few months ago to develop NAND flash memory five times faster than the conventional NAND. Taking the initiative further, Intel has also sewn up a deal with Sun Microsystems.

Sun has committed to deliver a number of storage products using Intel's SSDs, which it says are designed for computing operations requiring a high rate of input/output operations per second (IOPS), today's key storage performance metric. These will be pitched to enterprise data centres. Sun has already been working on offering flash drives as an alternative in its servers.

Sun expects to offer enterprise storage solutions that will exploit the breakthrough performance of Intel's High Performance Solid-State Drives and deliver significant performance gains while consuming a fraction of the energy of traditional spinning disk arrays.

Intel claims its X25-E SSD is more efficient and up to 100 times faster over HDDs as measured in IOPS. A storage model which includes SSDs can also lower energy costs by up to five times, an added benefit for businesses focused on electricity savings, the company claims.

Source: India Times