SANTA ANA, Calif., Oct. 17, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- SimpleTech, Inc. (Nasdaq:STEC) today announced the availability of its Zeus Solid State Drive ("SSD") with Fibre Channel Interface. This latest addition to the expanding set of SSD products will offer sustained throughput in excess of 70MB/s in 3.5" form factor, with 400MB/s duplex burst read and write speed, all of which is done with an extremely low 5.0W power draw.
The Industrial Flash market continues to grow at a rapid pace, and the demands for expanded interface support and high reliability are increasing. According to Alan Niebel of Web-Feet Research, the Industrial Flash market is projected to grow from $550 million in 2006 to $4.3 billion by 2010. This strong growth reflects the speed with which Industrial customers and OEMs are embracing NAND Flash-based Solid State Drives as the preferred medium for high performance and high reliability storage.
In a recent contract award, the U.S. Army committed to outfit Apache attack helicopters with new sensor electronics from Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT). These high performance systems are designed to accommodate SimpleTech's 80GB Fibre Channel SSDs to provide mass storage for recording real-time sensor data.
"The Apache Longbow program is a high priority for Lockheed Martin, and we design our storage systems with the world's highest quality components," said Charlie Myers, Longbow Fire Control Radar technical director at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. "We qualified the right partner for this important program due to SimpleTech's proven ability to meet challenging technical requirements."
SimpleTech has numerous existing OEM customers with acute interest in using Fibre Channel as the preferred interface option for the Zeus SSD family. Fibre Channel is viewed as a vital interface for both military/aerospace applications and enterprise applications due to its widely recognized ability to deliver 24x7 power-on operations with high reliability at high I/O duty cycles. Fibre Channel also provides exceptional bandwidth flexibility as well as physical flexibility in allowing the system designer to put storage anywhere using a lightweight cable between initiator and target.
"We continue to expand the solid state storage solution set to meet the evolving needs of our customers and to enable new markets," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at SimpleTech. "Our customers need product breadth, and it is our mission to deliver the optimal mix of interface options, form factor options, speed and capacity configurations. The common need among system designers in enterprise storage, enterprise computing, data recording, and computer simulations is for increased data throughput coupled with high reliability. For those reasons, we are bringing the Zeus Fibre Channel product to market."
As interface options proliferate for hard disk drives, the same options are becoming available for solid state drives. Fibre Channel is widely supported by the hard disk drive manufacturers due to the needs from high reliability (non-desktop) applications. These systems also have the same requirement of solid state drives, thus there will need to be broad support for the interface in both hard disk drive and SSD. To meet the needs of these high reliability and high performance systems, solid state drive manufacturers need to move in-line with industry-wide technology trends and have all of these interface options.
To complete the Zeus offering, SimpleTech will support the full range of advanced data protection features with the Fibre Channel product, offering BasicPurge(tm), RapidPurge(tm), MilPurge(tm) (in compliance with security guidance DoD 5220.22-M, NSA 130-2, AFSSI 5020, AR 380-19, and Navso 5239) as well as Intelligent Destructive Purge(tm). The product will support a broad range of operating temperatures, from commercial (0 degrees C to +70 degrees C) to industrial (-40 degrees C to +85 degrees C), as well as operating altitudes up to 80,000 feet, operating shock up to 1,500G (MIL-STD-810F) and operating vibration up to 16.3G RMS (MIL-STD-810F). Beyond these advanced features, the Zeus Fibre Channel product delivers accelerated data speeds and access times, which are paramount for systems that have multiple simultaneous data streams. The Zeus Fibre Channel product offers extremely low latency of 0.9 msec, and dramatically enhanced seek times (read/write) of 0.8 msec / 0.7 msec.
SimpleTech is now shipping the Zeus Fibre Channel product.
About SimpleTech
SimpleTech, Inc. designs, develops, manufactures and markets custom and open-standard memory solutions based on Flash memory and DRAM technologies, and external storage solutions. Headquartered in Santa Ana, California, the company specializes in developing high-density DRAM memory modules and high-speed, high-capacity solid-state Flash drives and memory cards used in sensitive and highly-volatile environments. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.simpletech.com.
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Safe Harbor Statement
This release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, statements concerning the performance and specifications of our Zeus Fibre Channel products, growth of the Industrial Flash market, and expansion of the solid state storage solution set to meet the evolving needs of our customers and to enable new markets. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted. Important factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements are detailed under "Risk Factors" in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission made from time to time by SimpleTech, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K, its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and its current reports on Form 8-K. Other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements include the following risks: Zeus Fibre Channel products may not perform in the manner anticipated, customer demand for such products may not grow as projected and new technological advancements in the field might produce more competitive products. SimpleTech undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
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