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The enterprise flash SSD market is taking shape under our very eyes. Following on from the EMC announcement Imation is jumping into the fray with Mtron.

The concept is simple and clear: combine Mtron's technology with Imation's global marketing muscle and channel reach.

There will be two families of Imation-branded product; SSD MOBI 3000 for mobile and notebook PC users, and SSD PRO 7000 for enterprise computing users. Both will have the tagline 'powered by Mtron.'

The MOBI 3000, according to Imation, provides maximum read speeds of 100MB per second, maximum write speeds of 80MB per second, and random access time of 0.1ms, making it the fastest SSD product in the consumer market. It also offers twice the boot speeds of current HDDs and works at significantly faster speeds for large rendering tasks such as multi-tasking, Photoshop and CAD.

The SSD PRO 7000 uses Mtron controller technology to deliver maximum read speeds of 120MB per second, maximum write speeds of 90MB per second, and random access time of less than 0.1ms. It has wear levelling, bad block management and error correction code.

Products will be released before the end of March.

The term enterprise spans a large spectrum of businesses and Imation is not known as a component supplier to enterprise storage drive array suppliers. However Imation does have enterprise credibility to the extent of its tape media manufacturing and supply. It's likely that smaller drive array manufacturers will be able to slot Imation's PRO 7000 straight into SATA or SAS drive bays in their existing products. That must be the hope.

If they move quickly then existing drive array manufacturers and suppliers such as HDS, IBM, NetApp, 3PAR, Pillar, Nexsan, Infortrend, Dot Hill, LSI Logic and Xyratex for example, could find themselves out-gunned on disk access speed at the upper enterprise level with EMC's flash-enabled DMX-4 and out-gunned at the low enterprise/SMB level with relatively unknown JBOD array manufacturers.

What an irony that will be.

Another impact of this is that there are now two flash SSD manufacturers with enterprise credibility: STEC through EMC; and Mtron through Imation. Watch the drive array world beat a path to their door.

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