Summary
With the recent announcement that Hitachi will be making Fibre Channel and SAS implementations of Intel's proprietary SSD architecture both companies should profit. This will pose a threat to companies like Seagate, Western Digital (WD), and Fujitsu who do not have such an SSD and rely on sales of enterprise HDDs, as well as to less sizeable SSD firms like STEC, SMART Modular, and others.
Analysis
The following is excerpted from an analysis that can be downloaded from www.Objective-Analysis.com:
On 2 December 2008 Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel announced a pact under which Hitachi will supply enterprise-class flash SSDs using a combination of Intel and Hitachi technologies by 2010.
Under the four-year agreement Hitachi will produce complementary products to Intel's, with Hitachi supplying SSDs that use the Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces, while Intel continues to supply SSDs using the interfaces they have already introduced: SATA, PATA, USB, and PCI Express.
Hitachi plans to introduce engineering samples in December of 2009, followed by OEM qualification devices and limited production in 2010.
We find it most interesting that number 3 enterprise HDD company Hitachi has beat out number 1 Seagate and number 2 Fujitsu to commercialize enterprise-class flash SSDs. Seagate, with a share of 64% of the high performance enterprise HDD market last quarter, has announced that it will introduce enterprise SSD products by 2009 but it has not clarified what sort of products these will be.
Seagate has the most to lose.... (continued at www.Objective-Analysis.com)
