SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Hitachi's global storage division, needing to
find a way to keep up with the constant advances in NAND flash at
competitors such as Toshiba, Samsung, Micron, SanDisk and Seagate, on
Aug. 9 introduced a new line of MLC (multi-level cell) solid-state
disks for enterprise systems.
The announcement was made at the annual Flash Memory Summit here at the
Santa Clara Convention Center, which continues through Aug. 11.
Hitachi's new Ultrastar SSD400M drives, which use Intel's 25-nanometer
high-endurance NAND flash, come in a 2.5-inch form factor with a 6Gb
SAS interface in capacities of 200GB and 400GB. It is designed to serve
as a so-called Tier 0 layer for high-transaction-type applications.
Tier 1 storage, also known as production storage, usually consists of
high-speed SAS (serial-attached SCSI) hard drives and is considered the primary tier for
production data. Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage tiers (generally consisting
of slower, cheaper SATA -- or serial ATA -- drives) handle non-critical data that does not
require the speed of Tier 1 storage. Some archiving is done at the Tier
3 level.
Tier 0 is SSD-based storage used to improve performance beyond what
current Tier 1 storage can offer for selected applications, such as
financial services, retail sales, and others. Early on, Tier 0 storage
has consisted of a RAM disk, which is more expensive than NAND flash.
NAND flash is moving quickly into this space.
Ultrastar SSD400M 400GB features write endurance of 7.3 petabytes (PB)
lifetime random writes, Hitachi said, which equates to 10 full drive
writes per day for five years. The new multi-level SSDs also include
all of the enterprise features found in the company's front-line
Ultrastar single-level cell (SLC) drives, such as end-to-end data
protection, error correction and error handling, Hitachi said.
"Tier 0 enterprise applications are of increasing importance as more
and more IT managers are redesigning their data centers for improved
total cost of ownership, and to support advances in cloud computing,
virtualization and thin provisioning," said Joseph Unsworth, research
director of NAND Flash and SSD at Gartner.
"The insatiable desire for data is challenging storage ecosystems to
deliver high-performance access to information while controlling data
center costs," said IDC SSD research manager Jeff Janukowicz. "The
introduction of MLC-based SSDs, such as Hitachi GST's Ultrastar
SSD400M, helps foster the market as it lowers SSD acquisition costs
while still delivering the enterprise performance and reliability for
which many IT managers desire in traditional enterprise storage and
cloud computing environments."
Hitachi GST is now shipping, and the company is currently qualifying
its Ultrastar SSD400M drives with select OEMs. Broader qualification
samples are now available with channel distribution scheduled in
September, Hitachi said.
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