Pliant Technology Wins 2009 Red Herring North America 100 Award
Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) Developer Recognized for Breakthrough Technology Innovation and Market Impact Potential
MILPITAS, Calif., May 27 /PRNewswire/ --Pliant Technology, developer of Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of high-performance solid state storage devices for the enterprise, today announced that it has been selected as a winner of the prestigious 2009 Red Herring North America 100 Award. The award identifies and honors the most promising, privately held technology companies that are expected to lead the next wave of disruption and industry innovation.
Selected by Red Herring'seditorial team from an initial pool of thousands of technology companies, Pliant has been recognized for its advanced Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) storage solutions. Pliant's EFDs are designed to deliver dramatically higher levels of I/O performance while meeting the growing need for increased energy efficiency and reliability in enterprise data centers and other high-performance computing environments.
"This award underscores the strength of our commitment to delivering IT managers and OEM system developers with best-in-class data storage solutions," said Amyl Ahola, CEO of Pliant Technology. "Our advanced EFD technology will dramatically increase the I/O performance, reliability and energy-efficiency of data center storage systems, enabling IT managers to offer new levels of service and computing performance, while lowering overall storage solution costs and meeting enterprise green requirements. We are delighted that Red Herring has recognized the tremendous and unique value that this technology will bring to market."
Pliant's EFD solution provides more performance and lower energy consumption than multiple traditional high-performance hard drives for enterprise computing environments, and is designed to take advantage of the ultra-high data transfer capabilities of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface technology. Strategically deploying EFDs within enterprise IT data center environments enables IT managers to meet I/O performance requirements with greater flexibility, while eliminating the energy and cost burden resulting from the common practice of "over-provisioning" disk drives. The EFD approach can slash data center energy consumption significantly, by up to 80 percent in many cases, and Pliant's EFDs fit seamlessly into the existing storage infrastructure.
The Red Herring North America 100 Award is a mark of distinction and high honor determined by the publication's expert editorial staff. They deploy a detailed process to whittle down a pool of 1,000 eligible, promising companies to 200 finalists, and in a last round select the top 100 winners. Evaluations are made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, innovation, management, global strategy, and ecosystem integration. Award winners were honored earlier this month at the Red HerringNorth America 100 event in San Diego, May 11-14, 2009.
About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company, which unites the world's best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe. Red Herring provides an insider's access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. More information about Red Herring is available online at www.redherring.com.
About Pliant Technology
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. Pliant's EFDs deliver breakthrough improvements over today's highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of data I/O intensive enterprise applications. The company was founded by a team of successful storage executives and engineers from Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum, and Conner. Pliant is based in Milpitas, Calif. More information is available at www.plianttechnology.com.
