Flash memory, so far identified with consumer products, is set to become commonplace in large enterprises.
Intel and Hitachi said they will jointly develop and deliver flash-based solid state drives for servers, workstation and storage systems. The first products are expected to be available in early 2010.
"Intel is already in mass production of 32-nanometer lithography," says Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing for Hitachi. "If you already have that it gives you a big advantage in being able to deliver a lot of flash technology at low cost."
The new solid state drives are intended to complement hard disk drives in business environments and in storage applications where high performance and power efficiency are the main requirements, say the two companies.
The drives will be branded, sold and supported by Hitachi and will use Intel's NAND flash memory technology and manufacturing. Intel and Hitachi jointly developed the controller for the flash memory and future development on the product will be shared by the two companies.
Solid state drives (SSDs), once popular in just consumer products such as ultra light notebooks are slowly spreading into business applications. SSDs are less fragile than hard disk drives and offer high response times but they tend to be also much more expensive than the latter.
"Though it has always been fast enough, this is the first time that SLC (single level cell) flash is actually mature enough in terms of data integrity and endurance for large enterprise customers," says Collins.
Other hardware companies such as Sun Microsystems are also evangelizing SSDs for enterprise users.
Intel and Hitachi are yet to determine pricing on their upcoming flash drives but say it is likely to still cost about eight times that of hard disk drives.
Intel and Hitachi said they will jointly develop and deliver flash-based solid state drives for servers, workstation and storage systems. The first products are expected to be available in early 2010.
"Intel is already in mass production of 32-nanometer lithography," says Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing for Hitachi. "If you already have that it gives you a big advantage in being able to deliver a lot of flash technology at low cost."
The new solid state drives are intended to complement hard disk drives in business environments and in storage applications where high performance and power efficiency are the main requirements, say the two companies.
The drives will be branded, sold and supported by Hitachi and will use Intel's NAND flash memory technology and manufacturing. Intel and Hitachi jointly developed the controller for the flash memory and future development on the product will be shared by the two companies.
Solid state drives (SSDs), once popular in just consumer products such as ultra light notebooks are slowly spreading into business applications. SSDs are less fragile than hard disk drives and offer high response times but they tend to be also much more expensive than the latter.
"Though it has always been fast enough, this is the first time that SLC (single level cell) flash is actually mature enough in terms of data integrity and endurance for large enterprise customers," says Collins.
Other hardware companies such as Sun Microsystems are also evangelizing SSDs for enterprise users.
Intel and Hitachi are yet to determine pricing on their upcoming flash drives but say it is likely to still cost about eight times that of hard disk drives.
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