If you're of the opinion that increased competition in a market can only be a good thing, you'll be pleased to hear that Intel and Hitachi are to be working together to produce enterprise-grade solid-state disks.
According to CNet, Intel has teamed up with Hitachi's Global Storage Technologies division to "jointly develop and deliver" Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel SSD devices for the customer with a deep pocket and even deeper need for major disk IO.
While Intel has been producing a range of SSDs for quite some time, it has always concentrated on the lower end of the market with devices that utilise the SATA connectivity technology; this partnership with Hitachi GST will mark the first time the company has looked to higher-end connectivity options to provide greater bandwidth and better compatibility with large-scale enterprise deployments.
The drives, expected some time in 2010, will be branded and sold by Hitachi GST and use Intel-manufactured flash memory. An announcement from the two companies claimed that neither was looking to replace traditional hard disks in the enterprise, but instead hoped to complement them – concentrating on specific implementations that require "extremely high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) performance and power efficiency" rather than raw capacity, where mechanical drives still hold the edge.
Although pricing information has yet to be provided, the very nature of SAS and FC equipment tends to price it out of the reach of most home and small office users. Still, we can but hope for affordable high-performance devices for the common man to be a natural progression of this partnership.
Hoping to see SSD technology take off as a result of the work done by the two companies, or is Intel merely using Hitachi GST's branding to launch a venture it's too scared to put its own name to? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Hitachi and Intel team up for SSDs
Posted by Engeneer Moris at 1:52 PM
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