Hitachi GST and Intel Sign Joint Development Agreement for Enterprise-Class Solid State Drives

Intel Corporation (Intel) and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) announced plans to jointly develop and deliver Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) enterprise class solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, workstations and storage systems.

The combination of a leading Enterprise drive supplier with a NAND technology and manufacturing leader will produce world-class solutions in terms of reliability, performance and system compatibility. The two companies will work together exclusively to deliver enterprise SSDs with SAS and FC interfaces, with the first products expected to be available in early 2010.

The new generation of solid-state drive technology complements existing enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) and is intended for use in storage applications that require extremely high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) performance and power efficiency.

The new SSDs will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi GST and use Intel NAND flash memory and SSD technology. Hitachi GST has expertise in drive firmware, reliability, qualification and system integration that, together with Intel’s technology and manufacturing capabilities, is expected to deliver world-class solutions with the performance and reliability that enterprise storage customers demand.
Hitachi GST will continue to provide its OEM customers with a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise storage products that includes traditional HDDs and forthcoming SSDs. Intel will continue to develop, market and sell its award-winning product lines of high-performance SATA SSDs.

Intel, www.intel.com
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, www.hitachigst.com