Solid partnership
Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) are to collaborate on the development and production of a new generation of serial attached SCSI (SAS) and fibre channel solid state drives (SSDs) designed for use in servers, workstations and storage systems.
These new SSDs are intended for usage models that requite "extremely high" input/output operations per second (IOPS) and power efficiency. They are expected to begin to appear in early 2010.
The nature of the partnership seems to be for Intel to provide the flash memory and SSD technology but for the drives to be Hitachi GST branded and sold by them. They will join Hitachi GST's existing portfolio of enterprise class storage products.
"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, VP and GM of Intel's NAND solutions group.
Shinjiro Iwata, executive VP of strategic business operations at Hitachi GST, added: "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 centre."
