With newer technology revolutionizing data centers, a new type of hard drive could address one of the nation's hungriest energy hogs. Pliant Technology announced today the availability of a new line of Enterprise Flash Drives, which promise 10 times the reliability of existing solid state drives and speed increases up to four-fold.

The Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) from Pliant will fit into 2.5-inch (150GB) and 3.5-inch bays (300GB/150GB)—they are designed to integrate seamlessly into current systems. They are the first flash-based storage form to feature a cache-less design alongside reliability features such as unlimited writes, which makes these new EFDs superior to existing solid state drives.

These new drives, designed for large data centers, provide the improved performance and reliability of solid state, but also enhance energy efficiency.

In a briefing with Matter Network, Pliant Technology's Vice President of Marketing, Greg Goelz, said "Budgets aren't climbing nearly as fast as user demand, so how do you do more for less? We're focused on that."

The company has been working for years, utilizing a team of enterprise hard drive veterans. Goelz added, "Enterprise storage is one of the biggest energy hogs and we see that trend growing in the wrong direction."

These drives require smaller footprints and less energy—requiring fewer units. Additionally, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface provides more bandwidth and independent ports—an improvement over Serial ATA.

Memory functions don't consume additional host resources, either in terms of CPU cycles or bandwidth, which results in sustained performance. The drives are also intended to be part of a new replacement strategy at the client level, according to Goelz, as these hard drives could replace fifty or a hundred hard drives -- "it's a different value proposition," he said.

Founded in 2006, the California-based company has plans to change the enterprise data center landscape. The Lightning LB (2.5-inch) and Lightning LS (3.5-inch) drives are being delivered for manufacturer evaluation and qualification and are expected to be available through authorized partners this month.

New business models are forcing companies to consider previously ignored categories such as efficiency, which were not given the proper deserved long-term attention. This new outlook will require technology that is just as forward thinking, such as Pliant's plans to produce cheaper, smaller, more reliable and less energy intensive enterprise drives.

Photo courtesy of Pliant Technology.