Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies teamed up last week to make flash-based solid state drives (SSD), used in computer servers and storage. Intel will be the only supplier of flash for Hitachi Data systems. The two companies will collaborate on research and development, and aim to provide the first flash SSDs in early 2010.

Hitachi GST is the third-largest manufacturer of disk drives, having acquired IBM’s disk drive business in 2003. The company trails Seagate and Western Digital, both of whom are still mulling over getting into the flash SSD business. Companies already in the flash SSD market are Samsung, Sandisk and STEC, whose drives are used by EMC.

Intel and Hitachi will develop Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel interfaces for enterprise systems and storage. The drives will carry the Hitachi name and be sold to OEMs such as EMC and Sun. Hitachi will support the drives.

In October, Intel rolled out a family of 32GB solid state drives for servers, workstations and storage that have Serial ATA interfaces. Sun also in November said that SSDs will be used in its Sun StorageTek 7000 Unified Storage Systems. Sun follows EMC, which introduced SSDs into its high-end Symmetrix family of storage servers.

The first SSDs Hitachi introduces will be single-level cell drives, while future drives will use multilevel cell technology.

The market for SSDs is growing. IDC predicts that it will hit a revenue of $800 million in 2012.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.