Friday, August 22, 2008

N.E. helps set up solid-state disks for growth surge

By Christopher Calnan

Solid-state disks are being projected for explosive growth during the next four years and local technology companies are playing an active role in the development of storage products using the new chip-based technology — including one company that plans to help produce affordable SSDs sooner rather than later.

Woburn-based Nantero Inc., founded in 2001, is licensing its nanotube-based technology to an undisclosed SSD producer, CEO Greg Schmergel said.

He expects Nantero’s technology to become a major factor in developing the next generation of SSDs, creating the tipping point to full-scale adoption. Schmergel said he is not sure when the vendor will release the new SSD, but he says it is imminent.

“It’s in the near term,” he said. “It’s not something in the distant future.”

This month, Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) unveiled the next generation of its Clariion storage system with SSD for midsize businesses, following the launch of a higher-end Symmetrix system that was announced in January. In June, Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA) revealed plans to produce solid-state data storage products partially developed by Sun engineers in Burlington and Nashua, N.H.

Already adopted for cell phones and digital cameras, solid-state drive technology is poised for unprecedented growth in the enterprise as tech breakthroughs make them less costly to produce, industry observers said.

Revenue from the SSD market is expected to rise from $255 million this year to more than $10 billion in 2012, according to iSuppli Corp., a California-based research firm.

EMC officials said the Symmetrix SSD product has attracted 50 customers, yet it won’t reveal names, citing competitive reasons. But iSuppli senior analyst Krishna Chander said EMC is beta testing the systems in time for a marketing push in early 2009, when IT departments typically start shopping for new systems.

Solid-state disks function electronically rather than electromechanically, which is how conventional disks function. Eliminating the mechanical alignment of the magnetic read head with the spinning disk required of conventional drives enables the faster speeds of SSDs.

Although SSD prices have steadily dropped in recent years, they can still cost about $3.50 per gigabyte, depending on the quality, compared with 20 cents per gigabyte for a conventional disk.

“The cost is justified now,” said Bob Wambach, EMC’s senior director of storage products. Clariion systems with SSD start at $31,185; Symmetrix’s SSD line starts at $250,000, he said.

Sun Microsystems expects to release about two dozen server and storage products with SSD by the end of the year. Development of the products took about two years, said Graham Lovell, the company’s senior director of open storage and networking.

The operating systems were developed on the West Coast, while Sun engineers in Burlington and Nashua teamed up on hardware and software, he said.