Seagate, Virident Hook Up for Joint PCIe Projects

Storage hardware maker Seagate Technology and NAND flash memory specialist Virident announced Jan. 28 that they have hooked up in a co-op deal to jointly produce new-generation storage for the burgeoning solid-state enterprise storage market.

That’s not all. For good measure, Seagate, one of the two largest hard-drive makers in the world (WD is the other), is investing $40 million in Virident for development purposes.

Seagate launched its first NAND flash drive in December 2009. This was about two years after solid-state drives started to make inroads into the enterprise storage market.

Under the new agreement, Cupertino, Calif.-based Seagate immediately will begin offering a complete line of flash-based PCIe solutions to its OEM and distribution partners.

Intel introduced Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) in 2004. It is a computer expansion-card standard based on point-to-point serial links rather than a shared parallel bus architecture, and is designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP standards.

PCIe-based flash storage has the ability to bypass traditional storage overhead by reducing latencies, increasing throughput and enabling efficient processing of massive quantities of data.

“Together, we are working to develop the next-generation hardware and software solutions in the PCIe space,” said Gary Gentry, senior vice president of solid-state drives at Seagate. “We believe that this agreement immediately strengthens our position in the enterprise storage market by adding a broad line of Seagate flash-based PCIe solutions powered by Virident to our portfolio.”

Seven-year-old Virident Systems, based in Milpitas, Calif., is backed by strategic partners that include Intel, Cisco Systems, Micron and NEC. For more information, go here.