Founded in 2001, TiGi is betting its 15 employees and its sole founder's seed capital on delivering solid-state disk (SSD) technology with interfaces and form factors compatible with industry standard hard-disk drives. Target customers include the government sector, as well as midsize and large enterprises looking to accelerate the performance of databases, CRM suites, Web servers and so on.

Though the solid-state disk market has been around for more than 20 years, most IT professionals have never heard of SSDs. So, what are they? They are storage media much like hard-disk drives. But, instead of using spinning magnetic media to store data, they use semiconductors.

There are two reasons most people have not heard of SSDs. First, the technology mainly has been marketed to the government for very high-performance computing applications. Second, they are not intended to replace hard-disk drives in most desktop and notebook computer environments. A 6-Gbyte hard drive, assuming you can still find one that small, costs about $50 and delivers read and write bandwidth on the order of 50 Mbytes/second. By comparison, a 6-Gbtye SSD sells for $7,500 to $15,000 but delivers on the order of 300-Mbyte/s to 1-Gbyte/s performance. The return on investment is very real for organizations needing to improve the performance of I/O-intensive applications; instead of buying more servers and software licenses, the organization can integrate SSDs.

The SSD market is littered with casualties, the most recent being Imperial Technology. The growing delta between MPU performance and disk I/O performance as well as the growing market for database and application servers may breathe new life into this business.

With a SCSI form factor, TiGi is bringing SSD technology to a broad array of customers. In contrast, rival Texas Memory Systems is much more focused on the high-reliability, high-density segment, where most of the market is today. To that end, these vendors are positioned very differently on the risk/reward curve-nice to see when so many technology companies market the same way.

Jeremey Donovan (jeremey.donovan@gartner.com) is chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest.