Pliant Technology has announced that its Lightning family of Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) are now qualified with the LSI CTS2600 family of configurable storage components designed to provide white box channel customers with the flexibility to assemble complete external storage systems to customers' unique specifications. Pliant also announced today that it has joined the LSI Channel Partner Alliance Program.

Pliant's Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) are designed to deliver breakthrough levels of performance, reliability and efficiency, enabling data center IT infrastructure and system providers to do more for less – achieve significantly higher system performance with lower cost, less power and a smaller footprint.  The LSI CTS2600 family includes affordable, high-quality external storage components such as controllers and storage enclosures offering support for solid-state drives (SSDs) as well as performance and capacity-optimized SAS drives. By qualifying with the LSI CTS2600 family, Pliant Lightning EFDs are now options for LSI white box channel customers to integrate into and deliver systems with 6Gb/s SAS back-end drive connects, multi-protocol host connectivity, mixed drive support, simplified management and low power consumption. The multi-protocol host connectivity includes 6Gb/s SAS and 1Gb/s iSCSI or 6Gb/s SAS and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interface options.

"Pliant's qualification on our CTS2600 family underscores the value that the channel community places on flash in advancing enterprise storage performance and efficiency," said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI.  "By supporting Pliant SSDs with the CTS2600, our channel customers can build custom configurations to address specific system and application performance requirements while maximizing storage density and energy efficiency."

"By qualifying across the LSI CTS2600 family of high-performance storage components, Pliant is well-positioned to provide the same technology chosen by leading enterprise Server and Storage OEMs to Solutions Providers building the best storage solutions for their enterprise and data center customers," said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing, Pliant Technology. "And by joining the LSI Channel Partner Alliance Program, we're able to provide Solutions Providers with assured interoperability and ease of integration for CTS2600-based storage solutions utilizing Pliant SSDs."

The LSI Channel Partner Alliance Program provides a venue for industry leaders in storage software and hardware to work closely with LSI to provide creative solutions that meet the challenges of evolving technology and a rapid-paced business environment.  These relationships are key to delivering advanced storage solutions to end customers that help ensure the compatibility, performance, and reliability they demand when configuring a storage system.