After two years of development, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has unveiled two families of its enterprise-grade solid-state drives. The novelties feature Serial Attached SCSI or Fibre-Channel interfaces and will be solely aimed at the markets that seek for maximum reliability and performance. The SSDs were jointly developed by Hitachi, Intel and Micron.

“Hitachi’s strategic investment and commitment in the enterprise market is evident with the new Ultrastar SSD family. Our new SSD product family not only symbolizes our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud data center infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing data center performance and reducing total cost of ownership,” said Mike Cordano, executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Hitachi GST.

The new Ultrastar SSD400S family comes in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities, featuring both 2.5" SAS 6Gb/s and 3.5" 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. The drives are based on single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory produced using 34nm process technology at IM Flash and is powered by controllers developed by Intel.

The new Ultrastar SSD400S family delivers the industry’s highest sequential throughput. It is the first to reach up to 535MB/s read and 500MB/s write throughput with 6Gb/s SAS, and 390MB/s read and 340MB/s write throughput with 4Gb/s FC. The new drive also delivers up to 46 000 read and 13 000 sustained write IOPS, reaching speeds 100 times faster than traditional hard drives.  As fewer SSDs are required to achieve the same HDD ultra-high performance, the new Ultrastar SSD400S family offers significant value in terms of IOPS per Watt, while reducing TCO through low power consumption, efficient cooling and reduced space requirements.

Working in collaboration with Intel, the Ultrastar SSD400S family combines enterprise-grade NAND flash, proprietary endurance firmware and power loss management techniques to extend the reliability, endurance and sustained performance of the new SSD family. The 400GB SSD can endure up to 35 petabytes (PB) of random writes over the life of the drive, which is the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years, ensuring greater utilization and reliability in the most demanding enterprise environments. For complete end-to-end data protection and reliability, the Ultrastar SSD400S family includes advanced data integrity and power loss management technologies that are tied with industry standards to ensure compatibility in multi-tiered SSD/HDD system designs.

The enterprise SSD market is growing at an estimated 73% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2009-2014. Social networks, mobile applications, web TV, online video services and new tablet-like devices – all operating in the cloud – are fueling the need for faster storage solutions and improvements in high throughput and I/O performance so data can be delivered to consumers with virtually no latency. Meanwhile, data centers are pushing the boundaries to make storage more efficient, from reducing floor space, power and cooling to leveraging next-generation technologies, like virtualization, deduplication and thin provisioning. All of this is causing a shift in how today’s IT managers are building tomorrow’s data centers.

Hitachi understands enterprise storage needs – from controllers, firmware, BIOS and operating systems (OS). With a global Systems Integration Technology Lab (SIT Lab), Hitachi works to ensure compatibility and ease of integration into new or existing tier 0 enterprise storage systems and designs. This makes it easier to bring products to market more quickly and cost-effectively.  With this level of commitment, the Ultrastar SSD family has been and continues to be rigorously tested in dozens of OEM system platforms across nearly a hundred configurations resulting in millions of drive hours under test.

“We have a strong track record of working with global enterprise customers and are proud to report favorable responses to the Ultrastar SSD400S family. With qualifications now underway, we anticipate volume shipments to commence in the first half of 2011.” said Mr. Cordano.

Hitachi GST has already shipped and is currently qualifying its Ultrastar SSD400S drives with select OEMs. Broader qualification samples are now available with product ramp scheduled in 2011. The Ultrastar SSD400S family is backed by a five-year limited warranty, or the maximum petabytes written (based on capacity).

Tags: Hitachi, Hitachi GST, Intel, Micron, Flash, NAND, SSD