Hitachi and Intel join to develop enterprise SSDs

Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) on Tuesday announced they will join forces to develop and produce enterprise-class solid-state drives with Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces. Meant for use in servers, workstations and storage systems, the SSDs should be both reliable and fast, the companies promise. The resulting SSDs will be branded, sold and supported by Hitachi GST. They will use Intel NAND flash memory and SSD tech, however, that the chipmaker already uses in its current enterprise SSDs.

Intel will then supply the tech and manufacturing capabilities, while Hitachi GST will handle the rest, including the firmware, system integration and reliability, among others. Hitachi GST will continue to offer traditional enterprise HDDs alongside the SSDs. According to Intel, the next-generation drives will include architectural developments that will reduce their size, power usage and cooling requirements. The drives will be suitable for applications that require extremely high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), the companies say.

Both expect the project to bear its first fruits in 2010.