STEC FC SSD for Hitachi High-End Storage Platforms

STEC, Inc. announced that Hitachi has developed their highest performance storage platforms utilizing the ZeusIOPS Fibre Channel SSD.

“This partnership with Hitachi is a reflection of the shared vision across Hitachi and STEC. Through close collaboration, STEC has optimized Flash-based SSD products to meet the unique needs of Hitachi,“‘ said Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of STEC. “STEC is proud to have the partnership with Hitachi, and we look forward to continued collaboration on Enterprise-Storage products.“

“Hitachi has been working very closely with STEC over the recent years to fully qualify Flash-based SSDs,” said Shuji Sugimoto, Hitachi’s General Manager of Storage Systems Development. “In order to support the enterprise OEMs with Flash-based SSDs, an organization must be a broad line supplier with the right mix of technology, infrastructure, quality and cost. STEC and Hitachi are delivering leading-edge technologies that enable customers to provide exceptional performance of business-critical applications, with significantly improved utilization, while also reducing power and cooling consumption.“

The ZeusIOPS product line is STEC’s high-end enterprise SSD product line, which has been in mass production for more than a year and widely available for enterprise OEMs seeking the optimal storage device technology for high performance and high reliability. STEC offers the drives in a range of capacities up to 1/2 Terabyte today and offers multiple enterprise interfaces spanning Fibre Channel to SAS to SATA. Due to ZeusIOPS’ unprecedented level of IOPS, the product is garnering mass adoption in numerous enterprise applications.

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Headquartered in San Ana, CA, STEC is becoming the king of high-end SSDs, especially for big SAN platforms based on FC, being a furnisher of EMC, Sun, now Hitachi, and maybe HP tomorrow.

EMC was the first to adopt STEC’ SSDs when the storage giant announced in March 2008 its entry into enterprise flash drives.

Last November Sun also qualified STEC flash disks for its Storage 7000 family.

Concerning Hitachi, its subsidiary HDS already announced in December 2008 its commitment to SSDs with 73GB and 146GB unit available for the USP V and VM systems in 1Q09. But Hitachi didn’t give any detail on the source of the drives. Finally, once more, it’s STEC (and not Transcend, another player in SSD, as it was also rumored).

Finally, it’s possible that HP will also handle STEC’s devices for its EVA, but this information has not been confirmed.

No source has been revealed by NetApp that just said it will be ready in 2Q09 for flash devices up to 672GB. for FAS3160 and V3160.