STEC Increases Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Performance With High-Performance ZeusIOPS(TM) Solid State Drives

SANTA ANA, Calif., March 9, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- STEC, Inc. (Nasdaq:STEC) today announced the qualification of its ZeusIOPS™ Solid State Drives (SSDs) for use with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). The ZeusIOPS SSDs provide exceptional transaction speed for high-end storage systems and present an ideal combination that will increase the overall performance of Hitachi VSP, enabling it to operate more efficiently and demonstrate the benefits of scalable tiering and ultra-fast response times, while providing improved energy efficiency. 

STEC's ZeusIOPS SSDs connect to Hitachi VSP through a high-speed SAS interface delivering enterprise level performance. The industry-leading Hitachi Command Suite management software further enhances the SSD-enabled VSP, offering end-users the ability to seamlessly develop and manage storage infrastructures within the virtual data center environment without interruption and with less complexity.

"STEC has distinguished itself among vendors by adapting and fully leveraging our industry leading technologies," said Shuji Sugimito, General Manager of Storage Systems Development, Disk Array Systems Division, Hitachi, Ltd. "Our new Hitachi Dynamic Tiering empowers our systems to take full advantage of high-performance storage media, which is why we chose STEC's ZeusIOPS SSDs. This pairing allows us to deliver a more robust and scalable Hitachi VSP to our customers, helping them transform their data centers like never before."

Maximizing IT asset utilization in today's virtualized data centers that have complex infrastructures and unified management is required to achieve the optimal performance in accessing critical data. Hitachi VSP achieves this by utilizing STEC's ZeusIOPS SSDs as the top tier, or most robust, storage media. As a result, Hitachi virtual storage and server environments offer improved business application availability and performance.

"Following our previous product qualifications together, we have once again collaborated successfully with Hitachi to deliver another state-of-the-art solution," said Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of STEC. "Today, by integrating our ZeusIOPS SSDs into Hitachi VSP, enterprise IT managers will be able to fully realize the benefits of tiered storage, and of our high-performance enterprise-class SSDs. This accomplishes our primary goal of adding significant value to our customers' storage systems and is another step forward in our pursuit of improving the attach-rate of SSDs to a wider range of high-end enterprise storage systems."