SANTA ANA, Calif., April 18, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- STEC, Inc. (Nasdaq:STEC), today announced an extension to its Zeus-IOPS Solid State Drive (SSD) family with the addition of 512GB and 256GB versions offering enterprise systems the performance equivalent of up to 200 hard drives in just one drive. The company also announced that an important agreement has been put in place with a worldwide leader of on-demand and real-time media delivery technology systems, wherein the Zeus-IOPS SSD was thoroughly analyzed and successfully deployed. This important customer views STEC's SSD technology as a vital means to enabling video-on-demand services at speeds that were unattainable using traditional rotating hard drive solutions. STEC will showcase the Flash-based Zeus-IOPS Solid State Hard Drives at Storage Networking World, April 16-19, 2007 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, CA (Booth PP3).
"STEC focuses on breakthrough technologies that solve major challenges," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC. "The Zeus-IOPS SSD will alleviate the concerns OEMs and HDD manufacturers have with both the scalability of enterprise aerial densities as well as the sustained drive speeds. STEC will continue to introduce advanced storage technologies to meet the demands of our important customers and their future applications."
High Performance at a Competitive Cost
While hard drive access times are measured in milliseconds, access times for Zeus-IOPS are in microseconds, enabling a significant increase in server processor utilization. Additionally, Zeus-IOPS SSDs are more than 200 times faster at random transactional performance than a 15K RPM enterprise hard disk drive, providing lower cost per transaction and enabling higher performing systems with far less hardware costs.
For comparable performance, a 200 hard drive enterprise system would cost two to three times more than a Zeus-IOPS system due to additional up-front hardware and reoccurring maintenance, power and cooling costs.
"The market has clearly embraced our Zeus-IOPS product line," said Steve Garceau, senior manager, SSD marketing at STEC. "We were the first to demonstrate such high levels of performance and customers indicated they wanted even higher capacities than our initial capacity points. STEC responded by extending the product line and is dedicated to solving key challenges for our customers in the fastest time possible."
STEC believes that solid-state Flash drives with high-IOPS performance will address the growing needs of the enterprise-class drive market. With NAND Flash prices declining on a continued rapid pace, prices for FC, SAS and SATAII-based SSDs are expected to drop below $2 per GB by 2012 which implies 512GB of high-performance storage for less than $1,000. Based upon these capacity and pricing dynamics, STEC expects that the high-IOPS SSD will make up a significant percentage of the $5 billion high-performance hard-drive market. This will make the comparative performance gains of SSD over HDD even more compelling.
High Reliability With No Moving Parts
Zeus-IOPS Solid State Drive overcomes the performance bottleneck inherent to traditional rotating media HDD storage and enables storage systems to realize outstanding, sustainable Input/Outputs per second. The drives have no moving parts for high reliability and offer a drop in non-volatile replacement for Fibre Channel hard disk drives.
The drives utilize STEC's patented IC Tower(TM) chip stacking technology to measure 147mm(L) x 101.6mm (W) and 25.4mm (H) and are available in capacities of 512, 256, 146, 73, 36 and 18 GBs.
Product specifications include:
-- 52,000 Sustained Read IOPS; 18,000 Sustained Write IOPS
-- 200MB/sec sustained, sequential reads; 100MB/sec sustained,
sequential writes
-- Interface: Fibre Channel, Dual-port 2Gb/sec, full-duplex
-- Power Consumption (Operational): 500mA
-- Form Factor: 3.5-inch standard HDD
-- Weight: less than 0.4 g
-- Standard five year warranty (extended warranties are also
available).
Pricing and Availability
OEM pricing is available upon request. Zeus-IOPS in 256GB capacity is available today; 512GB Zeus-IOPS is planned to be in mass production by the end of third quarter, 2007. Sales information is available at http://www.stec-inc.com, via email at info@stec-inc.com or by calling (949) 476-1180.
About STEC
STEC, Inc., with headquarters in Santa Ana, California, designs, manufactures and markets high performance memory and storage solutions based on Flash and DRAM technologies. For more information, visit the company's web site at www.stec-inc.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
This release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, statements concerning the performance of Zeus-IOPS products, potential customers sampling Zeus-IOPS products and their level of interest, our ability to address the growing enterprise-class drive market, expected NAND Flash price declines, and anticipated price spread between HDD and SSD. 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 STEC, 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-IOPS 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. STEC 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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