BiTMICRO announced at the Supercomputing 2007 (SC07) International Conference its plan to introduce to the market the 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima 4Gbit Fibre Channel flash disk with up to 1.6 TB capacity for high-performance computing applications.

The 3.5-inch 4Gb Fibre Channel E-Disk Altima E3F4FL flash disk is designed to deliver high-bandwidth storage performance for volume data transfer applications, such as streaming video on demand, medical imaging, data recording, data mining, data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP). This solid state drive is expected to take full advantage of 4 Gb FC technology by delivering sustained rates of more than 230 MB per second and upwards of 55,000 I/O operations per second.

Utilizing the latest high-density single level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips, the 4 Gb FC 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima E3F4FL flash disk delivers a storage capacity of up to 1.6 TB of pure solid state storage, allowing users to handle ever increasing amounts of data while leveraging the performance benefits of 4Gbit FC technology at the same time. The E-Disk Altima E3F4FL solid state drive is fully compatible with older 1 Gbit and 2 Gbit FC devices.

“Some segments of the enterprise storage market require very high performance and reliability. Increasingly, datacenters will look to SSDs to satisfy these requirements.” says Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager for Solid State Drives at IDC. “Solutions like BiTMICRO’s 4Gbit Fibre Channel flash SSDs powered by its high performance EDSA and LUNETA ASICs will help to enable this fast-growing market sector for SSDs. IDC expects worldwide enterprise SSD revenues to grow by 76% annually from 2006 to 2011.”

The Enhanced Datamover and Storage Accelerator (EDSA) DMC is a controller that succeeds the highly successful disk controller chipset of BiTMICRO’s electronic disk technology. The EDSA DMC supports large block NAND flash as well as single, dual, quad-die flash devices, allowing BiTMICRO to hike E-Disk solid state disk capacities to terabytes of pure flash memory. EDSA goes hand in hand with the Logical Unifier of Extensive Transfer Arrays (LUNETA) MFI, BiTMICRO’s flash memory management interface controller that is designed to orchestrate massively parallel and multi-block I/O operations on large arrays of flash devices.

Sampling for the 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima 4 Gb Fibre Channel solid state drive is expected to begin in Q1 2008 and will ship in volume by Q2 2008 in capacities ranging from 16GB to 1.6TB.