SMART Global Holdings today announced the formation of a new independent company, built to focus on flash and solid state disks (SSDs) for enterprises.
SMART Storage Systems plans on taking advantage of the growth in the SSD market as more companies begin to move from traditional hard drives to the speedier storage technology.
2012 is the year of SSD it is finally becoming a proven platform for high-speed transactional storage.
As a standalone organisation, it will have its own executive team separate from its parent company, as well as independent engineers, sales and marketing employees, and a dedicated manufacturing plant in Malaysia.
"Organisations in nearly every market sector are finding that the need to access and process information is outpacing the performance capabilities in traditional hard-drive based server environments," said John Scaramuzzo, president of SMART Storage.
"SMART Storage is not only focused on overcoming these bottlenecks by bringing high-performance SSDs to market, but also on solving the inherent endurance issues of flash."
The year of SSD' has been touted for sometime now, and is a belief held by SMART Storage and SMART Global Holdings. Now, it seems, industry analysts are on-board as well.
"Yes, 2012 is the year of SSD it is finally becoming a proven platform for high-speed transactional storage, and is now available as a tier 0 option in the vast majority of new storage systems," Clive Longbottom, founder and senior analyst at Quocirca, told IT Pro.
"As a tier -1 solution, companies such as TI and Fusion io are also pushing the envelope with their PCI-X SSD systems that push performance even further."
However, he did question the idea of having a purely SSD focused company for the storage firm, as although pure SSD offerings will be useful for OEMs and for certain applications, most customers will be looking at a hybrid approach.
"The long term successful storage vendors from any area will be those who can figure out how to build in such intelligence as close to the storage components as possible and those who have a balanced portfolio will be better positioned for this than any company attempting to specialise in just one type of storage," concluded Longbottom.
SMART Storage has been created from the funding acquired by the parent company in August last year from Silver Lake Partners and Silver Lake Sumeru.
