Hitachi GST and Intel to jointly develop Solid State Drives (SSD)

Intel Corporation and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies(GST) signed agreement 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 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.
"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