SSDs on a rat race?

Seagate Technology has made its long anticipated entry into the flash-based solid state drive (SSD) space with its 'Pulsar' SSD for direct attachment to servers. The product is called Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2, and is designed for the enterprise segment.

Seagate's SSDs boast of high read speed and support high write speed. Sequential read and write data rates are 240 Mbps and 200 Mbps respectively. Hard disk drive sustained data rates are less than 150 Mbps read or write. The storage capacity of the Pulsar SSD can be as high as 200 GB. It uses single level cell (SLC) flash memory like most modern enterprise SSDs since SLC flash is faster and lasts longer.

Interestingly, Seagate's enterprise announcements came just days after Western Digital announced that it will shell out $4.3 bn for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Rajesh Khurana, country manger-India and Saarc, Seagate Technology said, "The surge in storage consumption is being driven not only by the growth of content and use within the enterprise, but also by new applications and devices. These include media tablets and other smart hand-held devices, that generate an even greater need for a new breed of storage building blocks to manage this explosive and complex data growth. This can be done in a more efficient, reliable and cost-effective way that directly or indirectly consume enterprise storage. However SSDs are a small but significant part of enterprise market."

Although a late entrant, Seagate's advantage will be the company's established relationship with OEMs, which will separate it from companies just entering the market. On the channel front, Seagate will leverage on its existing hard drive partners. However, the new SSD products will also be available to them. "We will be more specific towards the enterprise partners as they are sufficient to cater to the market in India. At present there are no plans to make any significant changes on that front," confirmed Khurana.

Vibhor Agarwal, director-marketing, Supertron Electronics, one of the national distributors for Seagate said, "SSD technology is extremely relevant to the Indian enterprise, considering its input/output capabilities. Many enterprise organizations are evaluating SSD technology at the moment, so there is an interest definitely. And as far as enterprise storage is concerned, most vendors have this technology on their roadmap from an architecture perspective on their high-end systems."

Manoj Gupta, MD, Fortune Marketing said, "Though the SSD concept has been around for a while as an enterprise storage technology, it started generating interest in India only 3 years back. However, notwithstanding this interest, SSD technology is yet to gain mainstream acceptance in the Indian organization. This is despite the fact that SSD prices have dramatically fallen during the past year."

Gupta said, "Pulsar XT.2 is currently being shipped to the notebook OEMs, however, both the SSDs will be available to the channel beginning Q2 this year. We are expecting the supply of Pulsar to start from next month. We are excited about the new line of business. Essentially we are positioning it to our existing channels including SIs and OEMs."

Aggarwal said, "We are a focused distributor of Seagate and are very excited about the launch of the SSD range of products. We see a lot of scope for SSDs in India as we are getting lots of queries from our partners. Our channel is already geared up for enterprise SSDs."