The enterprise flash business as a whole, which has faced some stumbling blocks over the years, is still growing fast, according to analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis.

"The market is really budding right now," Handy said. His company forecasts global SSD shipments to rise from 170,000 this year to 4.1 million in 2015 while revenue increases from US$425 million to $3.8 billion.

SSDs long suffered a reputation as not reliable or long-lived enough for enterprise use, but much of the problem had to do with the controllers that were used to manage the flash in earlier products, Handy said. Some used controllers that were designed for consumer Compact Flash cards, which get much less intensive reading and writing use than enterprise storage does, Handy said. With purpose-built controllers, SSDs don't represent a step down from the reliability and long life of HDDs (hard disk drives), he said.

SSDs are likely to remain more expensive than HDDs for the foreseeable future, but enterprises will pay the premium for their speed where it is needed, Handy believes.

Intel and Hitachi fell behind schedule because some development took longer than expected and they have added more features and carried out more testing of the products, Hitachi's Hansen said.