Solid State Storage (SSD) continues to gain interest in markets of all sizes, from user laptops to home gaming systems to small business servers to the enterprise itself. Very few companies cover that full spectrum like OCZ can. OCZ is a global company with R&D and engineering at their corporate headquarters in San Jose, CA. Manufacturing is based in Asia and they have sales coverage throughout the world.
In a recent briefing with Storage Switzerland, OCZ covered their new HD form factor SSDs and their new PCIe-SSD as well as their capability to provide a Virtual Controller Architecture in these products. First up was OCZ’s Deneva Series, leveraging the SandForce 1222 controller. This controller improves performance of SSD that use it as well as improves reliability. This enables the use of eMLC and MLC flash NANDs to lower the costs of SSD. These drives have emergency data loss protection, improved flash endurance and superior encryption. Additionally, the Deneva Series maximizes MLC throughput with up to 250MB/s reads, 240MB/s writes, and 4KB random writes up to 30,000 4k Random Write IOPS. Deneva is available in a wide range of formats, potentially the widest I have seen; SATA, SAS, FC and PCIe.
Next up was the Deneva 2 Series which builds on the Deneva 1 and leverages the SandForce 2281 controller. While they offer essentially the same levels of reliability as the Deneva 1, the units have the ability to go twice as fast pushing MLC performance to 550MB/s Reads, 525MB/s Writes and 80,000 4k Random Write IOPS.
It is interesting to note that in both of these cases write performance is only slightly slower than read performance, further evidence that technology can overcome the issues with Flash writes. We expect the difference between read and write performance to almost disappear over the next few years. With the advanced wear leveling and improved write performance of these types of SSD solutions, using SSD for mixed read/write workloads can be done with little concern over the Flash wearing out prematurely.
Finally OCZ wrapped up with their newest drive, the Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD. We have always been big fans of PCIe based SSD technology. It eliminates much of the bottleneck that customers have to deal with on the network by giving the fastest storage direct access to the processor. The numbers for the PCIe prove this out: Reads are up to 1000 MB/s, Writes are 970 MB/s and the board generates 135,000 4K Random Write IOPS for the full height card.
What was most interesting about the Z-Drive R3 though are two additional features. The first is its design; it is available in a low profile so it can fit in a tight server environment. Many PCIe cards are full sized and those 1U-2U servers that are common place in the data center just don’t have the room for that big of a card.
The second is something that OCZ calls Virtual Controller Architecture (VCA). The goal of VCA is to increase enterprise SSD performance even further while maintaining the data management functions that are so critical in flash solid state technology. VCA has the ability to virtualize the resources of two or more controller interfaces and storage processors to a single physical interface via software. As a result VCA is able to address NAND Flash in a massively parallel manor. Parallel addressing is critical to maximize the total performance capability of solid state systems. Other manufacturers, if they attempt to create parallelism, have to do this by using custom ASICs. Doing so increases costs, increases size and delays development cycles. VCA could be a key advantage for OCZ going forward.
Storage Swiss Take
SSD Manufacturers are in a race to increase performance and improve reliability even though the Flash memory they use requires more error correction with each generation. More error correction is going to require increasingly sophisticated Flash controllers which could make it difficult for some manufacturers to continue to provide faster, higher capacity SSD solutions at lower prices. The VCA technology gives OCZ the vehicle it needs to accomplish that task.
OCZ Technology is not a client of Storage Switzerland
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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