Hitachi teams up with Intel in solid state drive business

Thursday, December 4, 2008, 9:04
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Intel (a major manufacturer of NAND technology) and Hitachi (leading Enterprise drive supplier) have together planned to develop and make shipments of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, storage systems and workstations. The move comes as a strategic shift for Hitachi, which up till now has not made a promise to SSD technology.

The two companies have announced to function jointly solely to put forward enterprise SSDs with SAS and FC interfaces, with the 1st products likely to be availed in early 2010.

The novel generation of solid-state drive technology balances current enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) and is suited to be used in storage apps that need exceptionally IOPS (high Input/Output Operations Per Second) power and performance efficiency.

The latest SSDs is expected to be branded and solely sold and backed up by Hitachi GST and make use of Intel NAND flash memory and SSD technology. The first delivery is slated for 2010, said by the companies in a joint statement. According to Hitachi GST, it would keep on to providing its OEM customers with a portfolio of enterprise storage products that comes with upcoming SSDs and traditional HDDs. Intel is also expected to build up, market and put up for sale its product lines of SATA SSDs.

Hitachi’s SSD business expects to sell the devices for business-use like in servers and PC storage systems, and won’t pursue competitors such as Toshiba in aiming at laptop PCs and additional consumer-based apps.

Randy Wilhelm, VP and GM, Intel NAND Solutions Group, was quoted as saying, “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. 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.”

Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president, Strategic Business Operations, Hitachi GST, quoted as saying, “We understand the needs of today’s enterprise customers and are committed to delivering breakthrough products that increase their data center performance and reduce total cost of ownership. By expanding our product line-up to include both traditional enterprise hard drives and new SSDs, Hitachi GST will continue to provide customers with a proven set of products tailored to meet the high-performance, high-reliability requirements of today’s data center.”