Pliant Technology
Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) Storage Solutions
“Design 1st continues to be a great partner and one we value highly. In the initial stages, it was critical that we get our EFD right the first time and Design 1st’s expertise and commitment was exactly what we needed as a start-up to be successful. To date, as the product comes to market after 3 years of development there is nothing like our high performance EFD on the market.”
Mike Chenery, President/Founder
Project
Develop an enclosure for a next-generation solid state hard drive (SSD) or Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD).
Summary
Pliant Technology produces advanced EFD storage solutions that provide much higher performance and lower energy consumption than multiple traditional high-performance hard drives for enterprise computing environments.
Solution
The Pliant team had extensive experience with high performance disk drive technology and while working with different suppliers to build the new product, they were referred to Design 1st when considering how to enclose the disk drive’s electronic components. Pliant required the expertise of a mechanical and industrial design team that would understand the EFD’s unique design requirements. Pliant needed their EFD to deliver dramatically higher levels of performance while meeting the growing need for increased energy efficiency and reliability. The design of the EFD’s enclosure had to take consideration critical heat dissipation and air flow. In addition and probably one of the most technically challenging criteria for the design was that the EFD had to fit seamlessly into existing storage infrastructures.
Benefits
In enterprise storage environments where multiple disk drives are operational, heat build up is the number one cause of disk drive failure – it’s a killer on electrical components. Design 1st was able to provide the Pliant team with thermal simulation models that demonstrated how the heat would be dissipated in several different enclosure models. In addition, at the prototyping phase, Design 1st produced Solid Lithographic Assemblies that were invaluable to Pliant who used them to jump start their selling process. Pliant also relied on Design 1st for their expertise in packaging, materials selection and manufacturing. The EFD design passed through Pliant’s casting suppliers without any challenges. Given the tight timelines, Design 1st’s delivery of a manufacturable design on schedule was critical to the successful launch of the Pliant EFD.
Company Profile
Pliant Technology is developing Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of solid state storage devices that integrate seamlessly into enterprise information systems and dramatically improve performance, reliability, energy efficiency, and TCO. Delivering breakthrough improvements over today’s highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of data I/O intensive enterprise applications, Pliant’s solution is available to OEM and datacenter customers now The company was founded by a team of successful storage executives and engineers from Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, and Seagate. Pliant is based in Milpitas, Calif.
