Seagate Technologies and LSI Corp. on Tuesday announced collaboration to deliver PCI Express-based solid-state drives (SSDs) for data center and cloud computing environments. The companies did not say when actual solutions are projected to hit the market.

LSI and Seagate bring decades of enterprise-level experience in the design, manufacture and support of storage products for critical applications. Through this joint effort, LSI is expected to deliver board-level products that integrate LSI Serial Attached SCSI and PCIe technology with Seagate’s SSD technology. Seagate is not known for producing SSD controllers or flash memory, hence, the claim about “SSD technology” may mean that Seagate has developed its own controllers to efficiently manage flash memory on high-end SSDs. On the other hand, it is LSI, who is well known primarily for chips and Seagate may only implement them in a proper way.

"We’re already deeply engaged in delivering solid-state storage technologies, from custom silicon to storage systems. Entering the emerging PCIe-based SSD market segment is a natural extension of our core competencies. By building upon the industry’s most widely deployed SAS software stack, OEMs and system builders will gain a proven, lower-risk path to market and continuity across technology generations,” said Jeff Richardson, executive vice president and general manager of semiconductor solutions group at LSI.

"These new LSI products will accelerate enterprise application processing and help reduce I/O latency by using standards-based interfaces and protocols to minimize the impact to existing end user enterprise infrastructures. The collaboration extends Seagate's enterprise solid-state strategy, which is focused on delivering the best-fit solutions for IT using both traditional hard disk drives and solid-state storage,” David Mosley, executive vice president of sales, marketing and product line management at Seagate

Market research firm IDC forecasts that SSD revenue in the enterprise segment will reach $2.0 billion by 2013. PCIe-based solutions will constitute a significant portion of this growing market segment due to their ability to further boost performance, reliability and ease of use within an existing IT infrastructure.

"Solid-state drives remain in the spotlight as a technology and an area of growth in the storage market. Future market requirements related to price per gigabyte, performance, power consumption and reliability align well with the benefits of solid-state storage, and PCIe-based SSS solutions are poised to meet these requirements in data center environments where higher performance is at a premium,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager of HDD components and SSDs at IDC.

Tags: Seagate, LSI, SSD