Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel have announced an agreement to jointly develop enterprise-class solid state drives for the enterprise data center.
Hitachi GST vice-president for product marketing Brendan Collins said that Hitachi would develop the host side controller, interface, firmware and device qualification. The drives will be branded as Hitachi drives and Hitachi GST will provide marketing, sales and support.
##CONTINUE##Intel said that it would be supplying compute-quality SLC (single level cell) NAND flash memory to this project as well as its proprietary controller and firmware that featured very efficient wear-leveling and write-amplification algorithms. The memory will be fabricated on a 34 nanometer process.
The agreement is exclusive and Intel and Hitachi GST will be sharing the risks.
The drives, to be available in early 2010, use a 6Gbps SAS (serial attached SCSI) interface and come in 2.5in. and 3.5in. form factors; 3.5in. 4Gbps fiber channel storage will be available for legacy systems.
Asked if the lack of standards was hampering things, Collins explained that today, organizations such as Jedec (Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council) and OEMs were working to put standards and definitions in place on endurance and wear-leveling issues. However, the big OEMs are not going to wait until final standards are ready. Companies such as EMC, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems will issue product requirements on performance and endurance, and then select two suppliers who can deliver within 5 percent to 10 percent of those figures to guarantee dual-sourcing.
However, second-generation products will follow a more standards-compliant process once the standards are finalized.
Most SSD drives are today aimed at tier zero of the enterprise, where performance is everything and cost is not an issue, such as banks, stock markets and insurance companies.
The other area is in the server blade, but this is because of the low power consumption of SSDs which are beneficial in extremely high density, high power racks.
He said that the price of flash would not displace hard disk drives in the foreseeable future. While the cost of SLC (single level cell, with one cell per bit) flash memory is coming down aggressively, the cost curve for SSDs is not coming down as fast.
Today the cost of a 2.5in. SLC SSD is between eight to 10 times the price of an enterprise (15,000rpm) small form-factor hard drive, and MLC (multi-level cell, in which one cell holds more than one bit of memory) is around four times the price. Predictions to 2012 still see both being more expensive than enterprise hard drives.
He said that in the '80s, everyone predicted that DRAM prices would intersect magnetic media one day, but by the '90s, the price of DRAM leveled out. He expects to see the same happen with flash.
"My take is that it will be five to seven years before the cost of MLCs will be interesting enough for OEMs to even consider it," he said. Unlike the consumer SSD market, where there are around 70 vendors, the enterprise SSD market has only three or four players. The market currently is dominated by STEC, which supplies SSDs to EMC.
The drives will be manufactured somewhere in Asia, and Hitachi GST does not have any plans for consumer SATA SSDs in the near future.
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BY Don Sambandaraksa
Source：Bangkok Post
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