Kingston Technology Co. has released its second solid-state drive geared for corporate servers and data centers, a new segment for the Fountain Valley-based company that built its name making USB flash drives and other consumer storage products.
The enterprise-class SSDNow E50, launched last week at the VMWorld conference in San Francisco, highlights Kingston’s latest diversification efforts as it eyes opportunity in a growing market littered with big-name competitors.
“There’s a larger focus on enterprise SSDs for us,” said Senior Technology Manager Louis Kaneshiro, who runs Kingston’s SSD project engineering group. “We know that in enterprise we’re going against larger companies.”
Namely Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, and Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest consumer electronics company.
Solid-state drives—which use chips to store data—improve performance and consume less power. They are also less likely to fail and take up much less space than hard drives, which use spinning disks to store data.
The SSDNow E50, which is 2.5 inches and weighs less than a stick of butter, is billed as speeding up cached data retrieval and boosting online transaction processing.
Kingston is targeting the product to cloud providers, Web hosting companies, online stock traders, production studios and others.
“It really gives enterprise customers a cost-effective way to implement flash into their data center,” Kaneshiro said.
NAND flash is the primary storage component in SSDs.
E100
Kingston debuted its first enterprise SSD, the E100, about a year ago. That product has gained traction in the past two quarters, but higher costs and unwanted capacity have stumped greater adoption, according to Kaneshiro. He said more customers want a 30-gallon gas tank, not a 100-gallon gas tank.
That’s not to say the E100 isn’t selling, as the company has already surpassed last year’s SSD sales, although its consumer line of SSDs is partly responsible.
SSD adoption has been boosted by easier implementation since it was first introduced, by support from data-center makers, and by more software products geared to enhance its benefits. Return on investment is another big factor; the product pays for itself in its first year of use through more efficient energy consumption and operational activity, Kaneshiro said.
The drives are expected to gradually replace hard drives in corporate networks and are increasingly being deployed in consumer products, such as ultrabooks and notebooks, and in industrial devices, including automated manufacturing equipment, kiosks and video surveillance systems.
Global sales are expected to grow at a 65% compounded annual rate over the next five years to some $20 billion, according to Englewood, Colo.-based market tracker IHS Inc.
Kingston’s corporate SSDs are attracting strong demand from the entertainment industry as movie and TV studios handle more data generated by high-definition filming and editing.
The company said Toronto-based Arc Productions Ltd. recently replaced its 24- and 50-spindle hard drive systems with three Kingston SSDs to meet stereo playback requirements for “The Amazing Spiderman.”
“It’s about doing more with less,” Kaneshiro said.
Relative Newcomer
Kingston, the world’s largest memory products maker for computers and consumer electronics, with some $5 billion in annual revenue, is a relative newcomer to the SSD market, debuting its first product in 2009, several years after the first SSD was released.
The company, despite its late entrance, has jumped to the leader board among global SSD sellers. It was ranked No. 9 in 2012, with a 3.2% market share and $180 million in sales, according to IHS.
“We don’t make decisions lightly,” Kaneshiro said. “When we decide to go into a new line, we go full board.”
Irvine-based Western Digital Corp. was No. 7, with a 4.4% market share, and Santa Ana-based STEC Inc. No. 10, with 2.9%.
Western Digital is set to acquire STEC for $340 million.
That list also includes No. 3 Toshiba Corp. of Japan, which has two OC-based units heavily tied to the emerging line of products
