After four years of development a California maker of solid state drives for the military and industrial customers is releasing an enterprise SSD.
BitMicro Networks said this week its MAXio E-series cards which slide into PCIe slots are now commercially available offering a blend of performance and capacity.
Founded in 1995, the military and industrial markets have been a lucrative niche that recently stopped growing, Zophar Sante, vice-president of marketing and sales, said in an interview. “But as we want to become a billion-dollar company we have to broaden our horizon a little bit and we started focusing on enterprise and commercial.”
Solid state drives are increasingly valued by enterprises for their speed over spinning disks. However, spinning disks are still less expensive and offer much larger capacities.
BitMicro said the E-series will change that. Initially being offered in 1.5 and 3.0 TB capacities, the company will in a few months offer a 6 TB version.
The cards are built around the company’s Split-ASIC architecture that uses BitMicro developed chipsets. The company says the E-series is designed for ideal performance for read-intensive applications, with a flash controller that optimizes performance and scalability.
Data integrity is ensured through the entire path in any interface, the company says.
It also says the usable life of the drives is up to five years.
SSD and flash drive makers — including slot-based and standard-sized drives — include Fusion-io (which is now owned by SanDisk), Toshiba (which this year bought OCZ), Intel, LSI and Viradent.