Intel, Hitachi agree to develop SSDs for business use

Addressing enterprise power-consumption and cooling concerns, the companies will offer SAS (serial-attached SCSI) and Fibre Channel solid-state drives.

By Matthew Miller, Editor in Chief, EDN.com -- Electronic News, 12/2/2008

Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies today announced plans to jointly develop and deliver enterprise-class SSDs (solid-state drives) for servers, workstations, and storage arrays.

Related links: Hands-on project: Solid-state drives challenge hard disks Replacing hard-disk drives with solid state: A challenging but opportune prospect for vendors Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert covers SSDs extensively in his blog, Brian's Brain.

The companies said the products, based on SAS (serial-attached SCSI) and Fibre Channel interfaces, will complement traditional rotating-media drives by addressing applications that require particularly fast I/O performance, demand high reliability, and need to reduce power consumption and its attendant heat dissipation. Examples include server and storage-array farms, where reducing the power consumed by the equipment itself, as well as reducing the need for air conditioning, directly impacts the corporate bottom line.

First products, branded and sold by Hitachi GST, are expected in 2010, according to the companies. The SSDs will benefit from architectural features Intel has boasted about previously when discussing SSDs, including support for 32 concurrent operations, dynamic wear leveling, and a low write-amplification factor.