Basilio said HDS took its time in rolling out the 3.5-inch SSD drive technology in its high-end storage arrays because there are few suppliers of the technology, there is a relatively limited request for it among HDS's customer base and it wanted to get the technology interface right.

" is meticulous about rolling out new technology and we had some mechanical difficulties. We didn't want to provide components that would cause user problems," he said.

As is the case with HDS' competitors, the company will initially offer SSD drives in 73GB and 146GB capacities.

Basilio emphasized that SSDs are complimentary to Fibre Channel drives in high-end systems and will not be a replacement for less expensive traditional hard-drive technology that offers greater capacity. For example, SSDs would be faster for certain database applications, such as mortgage analysis, credit card transaction processing or seismic data rendering. But jobs that require more typical I/O would still reside on Fibre Channel, if not lower tiers of storage.

HDS' Hitachi Storage Command software management suite will fully support its new tier 0 flash-based storage, which allows storage administrators to classify data for placement on different tiers of storage, replicate data and dynamically provision storage with a single set of management tools.