OCZ’s Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD offers 2,800MB/sec, 500,000 IOPS, various thrills

The Z-Drive R4 Provides without equal Solution for giant Data and Cloud Computing Applications by Coupling Enterprise-Class Power Fail Protection with Benchmark-Shattering Performance

SAN JOSE, CA-August 2, 2011-OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a number one provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the discharge of Z-Drive Revision 4 (R4) PCI Express (PCIe) storage solutions designed to dramatically accelerate enterprise applications and significantly reduce total cost of ownership within the data center. The Z-Drive R4 product line features OCZ’s second generation proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0, providing the maximum in performance, flexibility, durability and enhanced reliability features, allowing data centers, for the primary time, to place confidence in a PCIe-based SSD as their primary tier one storage solution.

“Objective Analysis forecasts that the PCIe interface turns into dominant within the enterprise SSD market in 2012, with unit shipments more than the combined shipments of its SAS and Fibre Channel counterparts,” said SSD analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis. “Reason why the PCIe interface puts less drag at the NAND-to-processor communication channel than do standard HDD interfaces. By 2015, Objective Analysis expects well over two million PCIe SSDs to ship, more than a few larger than each of the SATA SSDs that shipped in 2010.”

The OCZ Z-Drive R4 is really unique, melding hardware and software managed solutions with integrated VCA 2.0. This brings traditional SSD technology right into a new realm and enhances performance, deployment capabilities, and endurance. VCA 2.0 is a multifaceted virtualization layer and interfaces with the OCZ SuperScale Storage Controller which mixes processing and entire DMA (direct memory access) cores, in addition to internal PCIe, SATA and SAS physical interfaces. When coupled with VCA 2.0 technology, the SuperScale Controller manages critical internal functions corresponding to OCZ’s intelligent Complex Command Queuing Structure (CCQS) with unique queue balancing algorithms. This mixture results in superior performance aggregation and ends up in significantly higher throughput and reduced burden at the host CPU.

With growing emphasis on cloud computing and large data, enterprises are contending with ever-increasing amounts of knowledge. PCIe-based flash storage systems be capable of bypass traditional storage overhead, reducing latencies, increasing throughput, and enabling efficient processing of huge quantities of information. A single SuperScale controller equipped Z-Drive R4 is able to transferring as much as 2800 megabytes per second (MB/s) and completing over 500,000 input-output operations per second (IOPS), while a dual SuperScale controller card reaches an astounding 5600 MB/s and 1.2 million IOPS. This level of concentrated performance enables system architects to design more productive infrastructures while lowering costs related to hardware failure, maintenance, structural footprint, and effort consumption.

“The demand for higher performing PCIe-attached solid state storage continues to grow, and our new Z-Drive R4 represents an increased focus from OCZ to satisfy the wishes of its enterprise and information center clients; it also represents a turning point inside the evolution of PCIe SSDs,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. “The Z-Drive R4 provides the very best of both worlds for storage architects by merging the industry-leading feature-sets of both the pure hardware and pure software based approaches to data management, while maintaining user-configurable flexibility not present in other devices.”
With the original VCA 2.0-based virtualization layer, the Z-Drive R4 offers a complicated set of capabilities designed to unravel problems inherent to pure software solutions. The Z-Drive R4 features power fail protection, differentiating the drive from software-based solutions where in-flight data resides in host DRAM and the flash translation layer, thus leading to lack of data during power interruption. As well as, VCA enables user-selectable data recovery and non-stop modes with IntegRecover technology ensuring enterprise-class data integrity. Furthermore, the Z-Drive R4 installation in enterprise computing environments is seamless because OCZ VCA 2.0 supports the industry-standard SCSI command set over a PCIe interface. Other features include consolidated SMART support, increased NAND flash life because of OCZ’s lower write amplification and TRIM/SCSI Unmap Support.

The Z-Drive R4 comes in two standard configurations: a half height version designed for space constrained 1U servers and multi-node rackmount servers, and a whole height version. Both configurations support single-level cell (SLC) or multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory with reduced write amplification to increase drive life greater than 3 times the manufacturer’s rating of the NAND. As with every OCZ enterprise products, customer-specific configurations and functionality come in upon request.