Intel and Hitachi to develop SSDs

[dwarakesh]

Intel and Hitachi have announced plans to jointly develop a new generation of solid-state drives.

The serial attached SCSI (SAS) and fibre channel (FC) enterprise-class SSDs are reportedly designed to be used with servers, workstations and storage systems. The new devices are capable of storing and accessing applications that require quick Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) performance.

The drives, which utilise Intel NAND flash memory and SSD technology, will be exclusively distributed and supported by Hitachi.

"The new solid-state drives for the 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, Intel 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."

The Intel-Hitachi SSD may encounter stiff competition from Micron's high-end solid-state disk drive that is supposedly capable of an 800MBps-1GBps throughput. According to Joe Jeddeloh, director of the vendor's Advanced Storage Technology Centre, the device could achieve a blazingly fast rate of 200,000 IOPS per second.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was formed in 2003 after the company purchased IBM's storage business. The unit is currently the third-largest HDD distributor, following Seagate Technology and Western Digital.