News

posted on 04 August 2008 13:33

Solid state drive (SSD) supplier STEC has announced an enterprise storage and server OEM design win.

The company is the supplier of SSDs to EMC for its high-end Symmetrix arrays where the SSDs provide the highest tier of performance storage, delivering 30 times more I/Os per second (IOPS) than Fibre Channel hard drives. EMC is going to add SSDs to its mid-range CLARiiON drive arrays shortly.

Another I/O-accelerating use of SSDs is to have them installed in servers providing a form of cache memory between a server's DRAM and the hard disk drives (HDD) it accesses. Sun has publicized this way of using flash with Dell and HP following suit. Samsung and Sun have jointly announced an extended-life NAND flash cell. No other server suppliers have announced their SSD supliers yet. STEC buys most of its NAND flash chips from Sansung.

Now STEC has won a second enterprise OEM, a storage and servers supplier.

Manouch Moshayedi, STEC CEO, said: "We are excited to announce that we recently received notice of a design win from one of the largest Enterprise Storage and Server OEMs, confirming our qualification across multiple platforms using our ZeusIOPS and Mach8/IOPS SSDs. We expect production revenue from these platforms to begin in the fourth quarter of this year. This is our second large Enterprise OEM customer win."

There are four candidates: Dell; HP; IBM; and Sun. The Zeus SSD would be for storage and the Mach8 for servers.

STEC is also being evaluated by additional enterprise storage suppliers with Moshayedi saying: "We are in the later stages of qualification for our ZeusIOPS SSDs with several other key Enterprise-Storage customers."

STEC is looking to gain more server OEM SSD design wins too. Moshayedi said: "... we are in the later stages of qualification with several leading Enterprise-Server OEMs for our Mach8/IOPS SSD products. We anticipate that we will be announcing additional qualifications at other major Enterprise OEMs by the end of this year. Further, we expect that both of these product lines will contribute significantly to our growth in 2009."

In the notebook space Moshayedi said: "Our MLC-based products have now been qualified at a number of leading Notebook and the Ultra-Mobile Notebook OEMs. We believe the current environment of falling NAND Flash prices will help to further reduce the price of SSDs to the end-customer and stimulate demand in both of these markets. We expect to begin shipping production units into these markets in (the) third quarter of 2008."

STEC has just announced quarterly results in which revenues rose strongly and net income increased slightly. It looks as if STEC revenues may be substantially higher in 2009 with the acronym SSD standing for Significant Sales Driver.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}