The companies a deal in late 2008 to jointly develop SSDs (solid-state drives) for enterprise servers and workstations. Hitachi plans to use flash silicon developed by the partnership of Intel and Micron in drives with SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, and Fibre Channel interfaces. Less than a year ago, Hitachi GST Director of Enterprise Marketing Dean Amini the companies were on track to deliver products in the first half of 2010.

Initial products now are scheduled to come out in the second half of this year, said Ulrich Hansen, director of market development at Hitachi GST.

"We did have a slightly more aggressive target initially set, but we're still very enthusiastic about this partnership," Hansen said in an interview on Monday. Hitachi is a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) to server and workstation manufacturers. These will be its first SSD offerings.

Hansen spoke on the eve of the Flash Memory Summit conference in Santa Clara, California, where executives and customers will gather to discuss the range of flash technologies from consumer electronics to data-center storage arrays.

Per gigabyte, flash storage is more expensive to make than HDDs (hard disk drives), but it typically uses less energy and allows for quicker retrieval of data because it has no moving parts. Enterprises that have adopted SSDs generally have used them for data that needs faster retrieval, while they left to HDDs larger amounts of content that isn't as urgently.