The world's largest chip maker Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies yesterday announced plans to jointly develop and deliver Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, workstations and storage systems.

While Hitachi is a large supplier of hard disk drives, Intel manufactures and sells consumer and enterprise-class solid-state drives and solid-state drives are generally faster and consume less power than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data.

Intel hopes that the drives will become popular especially for corporate users who use it in its data-center computers.

The combination of a leading Enterprise drive supplier with a NAND technology and manufacturing leader will produce world-class solutions in terms of reliability, performance and system compatibility.

The two companies will work together exclusively to deliver enterprise SSDs with SAS and FC interfaces, with the first products expected to be available in early 2010.

The new generation of solid-state drive technology complements existing enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) and is intended for use in storage applications that require extremely high input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance and power efficiency.

The new SSDs will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi GST and use Intel NAND flash memory and SSD technology.

Hitachi GST has expertise in drive firmware, reliability, qualification and system integration that, together with Intel's technology and manufacturing capabilities, is expected to deliver world-class solutions with the performance and reliability that enterprise storage customers demand.

Hitachi GST will continue to provide its OEM customers with a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise storage products that includes traditional HDDs and forthcoming SSDs. Intel will continue to develop, market and sell its award-winning product lines of high-performance SATA SSDs.

"The new solid-state drives for the enterprise include a number of architectural breakthroughs and improve performance and energy usage models that will change enterprise computing," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group. "Intel and Hitachi GST share a common objective in delivering SAS/FC products based on solid-state technology that will help enterprise customers meet the skyrocketing demands for performance while reducing space, power and cooling costs."

"We understand the needs of today's enterprise customers and are committed to delivering breakthrough products that increase their data center performance and reduce total cost of ownership," said Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president, Strategic Business Operations, Hitachi GST.

"By expanding our product line-up to include both traditional enterprise hard drives and new SSDs, Hitachi GST will continue to provide customers with a proven set of products tailored to meet the high-performance, high-reliability requirements of today's data center," he added.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was formed in 2003 with the acquisition of IBM's storage business, and is the third-largest seller of hard disk drives after Seagate and Western Digital.