New group forms for SSD standards

James Delahunty
29 Oct 2010 18:42

A broad coalition of industry-leading IT firms has announced the formation of the Solid State Drive (SSD) Form Factor Working Group.
The group will work to advance the benefits of Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) storage drives through standardization. The working group will focus on enterprise customers who are pushing the storage IO envelope and require high-performance, easy-to-use, cost-effective storage solutions to optimize CPU performance.

Promoter Members of the group include Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM and Intel while Contributor Members include Amphenol, Emulex, Fusion-io, IDT, Marvel Semiconductor, Micron Technology, Molex, PLX, QLogic, STEC, SandForce and Smart Modular Technology.
To help customers, the SSD Form Factor Working Group is dedicated to advancing technology standards in three technology areas...

• A connector specification which will promote interoperability of several storage protocols, supporting SAS/SATA 3.0 as well as PCIe 3. This allows greater user choice and flexibility.
• A form factor which builds upon the current 2.5-inch standard to enable enclosure flexibility while supporting the new connector definition and expanding the power envelope in support of higher performance.
• The support for hot-plug capability to create high-availability and serviceability benefits.

"Intel sees PCIe continuing to grow in importance as a solid state drive interface driven by native attach points in our enterprise platforms. Intel is looking forward to working with SSD Form Factor Working Group to collectively define the essential building blocks for future generations of non-volatile memory storage solutions," said Tom Macdonald, Vice President of Intel Architecture Group and General Manager of Platform Components Group at Intel.