Verari Systems^®, a premier developer of independent blade-based computing and storage platforms for the data center with the highest density, availability, and energy efficiency in the market, today announced HyDrive^™, the industry’s first hybrid enterprise storage blade. The new Verari HyDrive disk blade integrates the Intel^® X25-E Extreme SATA 2.5-inch Solid-State Drives (SSD) as well as high capacity 3.5-inch SATA hard drives into the highly successful Verari BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms. The Intel SSD-based technology being deployed by the Verari Systems Storage Division is part of a complete enterprise solution set that adds Intel’s newly released X-25M and X25-E SSDs to Verari’s core product portfolio of rack-optimized servers and BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms.

Verari’s SSD-based server and storage solutions are ideally suited to support applications which need to process massive amounts of information very quickly, including IPTV video streaming, electronic trading systems, real-time data processing, metadata processing, and data center virtualization applications.

Solid-state drives deliver response times that are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest hard disk drives and multiple SSDs in a storage array can quickly saturate today’s RAID controller technology. Balanced system performance and sensible price per gigabyte is achieved in the HyDrive disk blade through the blending of both performance optimized SSDs along with 3.5-inch capacity optimized HDDs in the hybrid disk blade architecture.

“A product like the HyDrive from Verari provides a potentially game-changing development for the server environment,” said Randy Wilhelm, general manager, Intel NAND Products Group. “With the deployment of Intel’s High-Performance SSD products in Verari’s BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms and rackmount solutions, innovative companies, like Verari, are able to offer flexible solutions that balance a customer’s need for greater system performance and power efficiency with total storage capacity requirements.”

“Verari is once again leading the industry with the most innovative blade-based storage solution on the market,” said Dan Gatti, senior vice president of worldwide market operations. “With our new HyDrive disk blades, our BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms can support nearly any business requirement, including the highest I/Os-per second. By utilizing Intel’s SSD technology, Verari now provides our clients with a set of enterprise level comprehensive server and storage solutions with performance, capacity, availability and energy efficiency that is unmatched in the industry.”

The new Verari HyDrive disk blade supports up to 12 hot-swappable storage devices in a single vertical U (VU) and combines the use of both high performance 2.5-inch SSDs and high capacity 3.5-inch SATA HDDs. This combination satisfies the diversified needs of enterprise-level high performance, latency-sensitive environments while helping IT managers meet their on-going storage growth and availability requirements.

The Verari Systems Storage Group is offering the Intel X-25M and X-25E SSDs immediately in select rack-optimized servers and BladeRack 2 X-Series platform solutions with storage blade support beginning in late Q4 2008.