Start-up Speeds up SSDs

By Greg McNevin

February 26, 2008: The solid state disk (SSD) market has been gathering significant momentum over the past few months, and with Pliant Technologies, a start-up with the enterprise market in its sights, claiming it has technology to greatly improve SSD performance, 2008 is already looking like a big year for the SSD sector.

Pliant has attracted a hefty amount of venture capital funding to develop its "new class" of SSDs for enterprise data centres, and while the innovation is rumoured to be controller-based, the company is staying mum until it is closer to release in Q4 of 2008.

Amyl Ahola, Pliant CEO, says that the technology’s performance comes close to that offered by DRAM-based SSDs with off the shelf flash chips, and as it is flash based no backup power supply is needed to protect stored data should the power go out.

Thanks to its use of common flash chips, the company also says that its technology will not be costly compared to other solutions, and will come in the same form factor as regular enterprise drives.

The move puts Pliant in direct competition with EMC and its “Tier 0” flash-based enterprise storage drives announced last month.

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