Intel and Hitachi have announced plans to jointly develop enterprise level solid state drives (SSDs) aimed at servers, storage systems and workstations.

The pair will create a new range of Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel Flash-based drives, which should be available in early 2010.

"The new SSDs for the enterprise include a number of architectural breakthroughs and improved performance and energy usage models that will change enterprise computing," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manger of Intel's Nand Solutions Group.

SSDs are still limited in terms of capacity, and the new drives will be designed to complement traditional enterprise-class hard drives in environments that require high input/output operations per second, performance and power efficiency.

The drives will be built on Intel's Nand Flash and SSD technology, but will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi. Meanwhile, Hitachi will provide the firmware, support and system integration.

"By expanding our product line-up to include traditional enterprise hard drives and new SSDs, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies [GST] will continue to provide customers with a proven set of products tailored to meet the high-performance, high-reliability requirements of today's datacentre," said Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president of strategic business operations at Hitachi GST.

Intel launched its first SSDs into the consumer market in September, beginning with an 80GB drive in 1.8in and 2.5in versions dubbed the X18-M and X25-M respectively.