Intel and Hitachi to Co-Develop Enterprise Flash SSDs

On December 2, Hitachi Global Storage Technology and Intel announced a pact under which Hitachi will supply enterprise-class flash SSDs using a combination of Intel and Hitachi technologies by 2010. Under the four-year agreement Hitachi will produce complementary products to Intel's, with Hitachi supplying SSDs that use the Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces, while Intel continues to supply SSDs using the interfaces they have already introduced: SATA, PATA, USB, and PCI Express.

Hitachi plans to introduce engineering samples in December of 2009, followed by OEM qualification devices and limited production in 2010.

Surprise! Hitachi Beats Other HDD Makers to the Punch
We find it most interesting that number 3 enterprise HDD company Hitachi has beat out number 1 Seagate and number 2 Fujitsu to commercialize enterprise-class flash SSDs. Seagate, with a share of 64% of the high performance enterprise HDD market last quarter, has announced that it will introduce enterprise SSD products by 2009 but it has not clarified what sort of products these will be.

Seagate has the most to lose by not participating in this market, since they are the leading enterprise HDD manufacturer and the standard pitch for the enterprise SSD is that a single SSD can replace more than ten enterprise HDDs at a comparable cost for very high performance applications, shrinking the storage system's footprint, power consumption, and cooling requirements. (Although many SSD makers loudly proclaim that SSDs improve reliability as well, our opinion on this is guarded until some unbiased source publishes a comparison pitting the reliability of enterprise HDDs against that of enterprise flash SSDs.) With compelling economic arguments like this the enterprise HDD market could face significant competition for some very lucrative markets.

But Other Companies Already Have Enterprise SSDs!
Hitachi will have a big advantage over many other SSD firms in the highly specialized enterprise storage business because their sales force knows exactly who purchases FC and SAS drives, are familiar with the extended qualification times (4-6 months or longer) for enterprise products, and the company already has long-term business and engineering relationships with those people—HGST knows where all the bones are buried. SSD makers who are not already entrenched in the enterprise HDD business have to spend far more time finding those accounts, discovering what specifications and performance subtleties are really important to enterprise storage vendors, and generally gaining their trust.

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