STEC, a designer, manufacturer and marketer of high performance solid-state drives (SSDs), has announced that Sun Microsystems has completed full qualification of STEC's -- ZeusIOPS and MACH8/IOPS -- SSDs for use in its breakthrough Sun Storage 7000 family. This qualification of STEC products included qualification with Sun's ZFS file system, a first-of-its-kind file system optimized to take advantage of multiple tiers of Flash technologies. "Our advancements in SSD hardware work in alignment with Sun's continued pursuit to deliver systems that simplify the way information is stored and managed," said Manouch Moshayedi, chief executive officer at STEC. "We anticipate a long, intensive collaboration with Sun to continue developing optimized SSD solutions that help advance Enterprise-Storage and Enterprise-Server workloads." "Sun prides itself on working with partners that support our drive for innovation in Open Storage. STEC has provided the high performance SSDs used in the Sun Storage 7000 family, which provides radical simplicity, performance and cost savings," said Victor Walker, vice president, storage development, Sun Microsystems. Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems provides comprehensive data services at no extra cost, such as replication, active clustering, compression and thin provisioning. Due to the unique flexible and open design, customers can benefit from continuous innovation and new data service advancements and features available from Sun through automated updates included in each system. STEC SSD technology STEC offers the industry's broadest range of SSDs, each with distinct product architectures to achieve the unique requirements of specific applications, spanning storage systems, servers, ultra-mobile PCs and beyond. STEC's multi-tiered Enterprise SSD offering enables OEMs such as Sun the ability to achieve significant performance improvements, power savings and improved total cost of ownership for Enterprise Systems.