Companies in the storage industry are ramping up SSD production and are continually unveiling new, and higher performing SSDs for enterprise and consumer use.

Intel and Hitachi announced that the two firms are teaming up to produce enterprise-grade SSDs that will use Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. The two firms expect the first products produced under the agreement to be available in 2010.

The new generation of drives will use Intel NAND and will be sold exclusively under the Hitachi brand. The drives will be used in environments where extremely high IOPS performance and power efficiency is needed.

Intel will provide the raw materials and SSD technologies while Hitachi provides expertise in drive firmware, reliability, qualification, and system integration. Intel will continue to build and market its own SSD products, like the X25 and X18 SSDs.

Randy Wilhelm of the Intel NAND solutions group said in a statement, "The new solid-state drives for the enterprise include a number of architectural breakthroughs and improve performance and energy usage models that will change enterprise computing. Intel and Hitachi GST share a common objective in delivering SAS/FC products based on solid-state technology that will help enterprise customers meet the skyrocketing demands for performance while reducing space, power and cooling costs."

Hitachi maintains that it will continue to build and offer traditional HDDs to customers and consumers. Hitachi's VP of Strategic Business Operations Shinjiro Iwata said in a statement, "We understand the needs of today’s enterprise customers and are committed to delivering breakthrough products that increase their data center performance and reduce total cost of ownership. By expanding our product line-up to include both traditional enterprise hard drives and new SSDs, Hitachi GST will continue to provide customers with a proven set of products tailored to meet the high-performance, high-reliability requirements of today’s data center."