SANTA ANA, Calif., Jan. 17, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- SimpleTech, Inc. (Nasdaq:STEC), today announced that it shipped the inaugural order of $360,000 of its proprietary Maracite solid-state drives. The order is a direct result of its recent acquisition of Gnutek UK, Ltd., developer of its proprietary Maracite solid-state drives (SSD) for enterprise storage applications. The customer, a leading global communication equipment company, will use Maracite in high-performance voice and data-handling equipment to enable more rapid access to data while significantly reducing storage costs.
SimpleTech completed the integration of the Gnutek team and is now fully manufacturing the finished Maracite drive at its facility in Southern California. Maracite will now be the high end of the Zeus product line and carry the name Zeus-IOPS. The break-through, solid-state drive is now in mass production and is sampling on a large scale to numerous OEM customers focusing on database servers for Internet search, online transaction processing, video on demand, and many other input/output ("I/O") intensive applications.
Enterprise OEMs are attracted to Maracite as it eliminates the previously debilitating storage I/O bottleneck, significantly reducing access times to vital data and dramatically reducing storage costs. Maracite delivers sustained read speed of 200 Megabytes (MB) per second and sustained write speed of 100MB per second. Beyond these sustained read and write rates, the drive also features the fastest Input Output per Second (IOPS) available in the market. The highest speed hard-disk drives provide IOPS of approximately 250 (referring to 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives) because they suffer from severe mechanical limitations such as seek times and rotational delays. In comparison, the Maracite drive delivers read IOPS of 50,000 and write IOPS of 18,000, performing the work of 100 rotating drives. This level of performance is achieved at all supported capacity points, ranging from 18 Gigabytes (GB) to 147GB. The Maracite helps systems achieve the remarkable performance gains that new multi-core processors enable.
"This level of customer interest speaks to the remarkable prospects for solid state storage, and it reflects our long-term focus on delivering advanced solutions to meet the demands of our OEM customers," said Mark Moshayedi, chief technical officer and chief operating officer at SimpleTech. "We embarked on a strategic endeavor to solve a major technological challenge for our OEM customers. We acquired an advanced SSD design team, quickly integrated the competencies of that team, and productized a solution which will enable numerous applications."
SimpleTech believes that solid-state Flash drives with high-IOPS performance such as Maracite will be able to 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 SSD drives are expected to drop to $2 per GB by 2012 which implies 147GB of high-performance storage for less than $300. Based upon these capacity and pricing dynamics, SimpleTech expects that the high-IOPS SSD will make up a significant percentage of the $5 billion high-performance, hard-drive market. This will reduce the price spread between hard-disk drives (HDD) and SSD, and makes the comparative performance gains of SSD over HDD even more compelling.
The high-performance Maracite product has dual ported 2Gb full duplex "FC-AL" Fibre channel interface. Specific capacities are 18GB, 36GB, 73GB, and 146GB in the traditional 3.5" form factor (height = 25.40mm, width = 101.60mm, length = 147.00mm). SimpleTech provides its normal Industrial Flash category five-year warranty for this 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. The company offers a comprehensive product line, including Flash and DRAM-based memory solutions and external hard drive storage solutions used by consumers and original equipment manufacturers.
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Safe Harbor
This release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, statements concerning the performance of Maracite products, potential customers sampling Maracite products and their level of interest, our ability to address the growing enterprise-class drive market, expected NAND Flash price declines, anticipate 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 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: Maracite 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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