SANTA ANA, Calif., Aug. 8, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- STEC (Nasdaq:STEC) today announced an extension to its Zeus-IOPS family of solid state drives (SSDs) with the introduction of Zeus-IOPS with 3Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces -- an industry first. Zeus-IOPS products are standard 3.5-inch form factor SSDs built with NAND Flash as the storage media.
"Market receptivity for Zeus-IOPS with Fibre Channel has been exceptional. Due to increased demand for other important Enterprise storage interfaces, we have evolved the Zeus product family to include SAS and SATA. STEC's SSD offering meets the needs of a broad range of systems and applications with interfaces that are of immense interest in the Enterprise," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC. "STEC is the only SSD vendor with laser focus on the high performance/Enterprise side of the storage spectrum."
The Zeus-IOPs product line solves the problem of rapid access to data -- a pressing challenge in the enterprise market. Storage OEMs have historically tackled the challenge of rapid access time by increasing the capacity of battery-backed RAM or through aggregating numerous smaller capacity HDDs just to get I/O performance. The Zeus-IOPS product family perfectly fits the needs of those applications. "Zeus will dramatically change the storage hierarchy by offering dramatic improvements in performance at improved costs, thus offering a permanent tier of high-performance SSD," said Wilkison.
With this introduction, the Zeus SSD product family now includes SATA, SAS, and Fibre Channel, offering a full range of high reliability storage solutions for transaction-intensive online systems.
High Performance with Random Writes and Reads -- Eradicating Latency
Access times for hard drives are measured in milliseconds. Comparatively, read access times for Zeus-IOPS are less than 20 microseconds while write access times are 60 microseconds, enabling a significant increase in server processor utilization and data availability. 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 nearly eight times more than a Zeus-IOPS system due to additional up-front hardware and reoccurring maintenance, power and cooling costs.
High Reliability for High Duty Cycles
Designed to handle 24/7 operation, Zeus-IOPS drives have extensive reliability features built into the controller architecture. Of utmost importance to storage OEMs and the customers utilizing those systems for mission-critical applications is the need for Full Data Path Protection to ensure that data integrity is maintained throughout the entire data path. STEC is the only SSD manufacturer in the industry to offer this level of data integrity.
Prominent product specifications include:
* 52,000 Sustained Random Read IOPS; 17,000 Sustained Random
Write IOPS
* 250MB/sec sustained, sequential reads; 200MB/sec sustained,
sequential writes
* Interface: 3Gbps SATA and Dual-port SAS
* Power Consumption (Operational): 500mA
* Form Factor: 3.5-inch standard HDD dimensions
* Weight of less than 0.4 g
* Standard five year warranty
Pricing and Availability
Zeus-IOPS SATA products are expected to start shipping to OEMs in Q407. Zeus-IOPS SAS products are expected to start shipping to OEMs in Q108. OEM pricing is available upon request. 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. is a global leader of SSD and memory solutions that empower a wide range of applications. STEC's precision design engineering and manufacturing have met the needs of the OEM market for 18 years. For more information, visit the company's web site at www.stec-inc.com.
The STEC logo is available at http://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=1079.
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 products, potential customers sampling Zeus 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 HDDs and SSDs. 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 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.
STEC is a trademark of STEC, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks referred to herein are the property of their respective owners.