OCZ recently released the latest generation of their Z-Drive PCIe flash SSD. This product builds on the Z-Drive R4’s performance and virtualization technology by adding new form factors and improving drive management. OCZ has also improved drive robustness and stability to address the needs of high-density server virtualization and database environments.
The Z-Drive 4500 is a PCIe Gen 2 x8 Enterprise-grade SSD that uses Toshiba’s 19nm MLC NAND flash. It’s bootable as a direct-attached device that comes in a full-height, half-length (FH/HL) form factor with 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB capacities. OCZ uses 8 LSI SandForce SF-2582 processors on this board to generate some impressive performance with up to 252,000 read IOPS and 76,000 write IOPS. It also produces and up to 2900 MB/s of sustained read performance and up to 2200 MB/s of sustained write performance. Drive endurance is rated at 680 Terabytes Written (TBW), 1300 TBW and 2500 TBW for the three capacity levels, respectively.
The Z-Drive 4500 has better performance than OCZ’s Z-Drive R4, but is also more robust with redesigned drivers for better stability and efficiency. It has an improved thermal design with temperature sensing and thermal throttling to maintain operational consistency in hotter data center environments.
WXL Windows Accelerator software enables the Z-Drive to be used as a flash volume or a cache, or both, at the same time. This improves caching efficiency and performance by running cache algorithms out of band and leveraging a cache warm-up and analysis scheduler.
VXL
Z-Drive 4500 also works with OCZ’s VXL virtualization software that enables its flash capacity to be fully leveraged in the virtual server environment. Running at the hypervisor level, VXL distributes caching resources across all VMs that are on that host, based on their individual needs. By monitoring data requests to and from existing networked storage it can reduce SAN traffic by as much as 90%.
Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA)
VCA is a virtualization layer that creates logical storage pools behind each processor on the Z-Drive which can be individually accessed by file systems, applications or VMs. In this way flash capacity can be divided among multiple logical users or aggregated for a single user via parallel access paths into multiple LUNs. VCA also balances drive loading and maximizes internal bandwidth to provide a nearly linear performance increase as more LUNs are engaged.
Enterprise Reliability Features
The Z-Drive 4500 includes in-flight data protection against sudden power loss and data path protection via data integrity checks to eliminate the propagation of corrupted data. Also, enhanced error correction codes (ECC and BCH) are used to help correct bit errors on the fly and internal RAID functionality provides additional protection against uncorrectable bit errors.
Storage Swiss Take
OCZ has been an innovator in the server-side flash space for a number of years, as evidenced by their high performance products and their VXL and VCA technologies. This Z-Drive 4500 is an upgrade to their Z-Drive R4 in both performance and enterprise functionality. They’ve added new Windows Acceleration software and features to make the drive more robust, to fit into the high stress environments of today’s data centers.
Recently, OCZ was acquired by Toshiba, the company’s primary flash supplier, as part of the consolidation this industry has seen over the past couple of years. This move says a couple things about OCZ. First, they’ll be around for the long term, as part of Toshiba. Second, their technology was sound, as this wasn’t an asset sale, but an acquisition, since most of the key OCZ personnel have transitioned to Toshiba. It also says they now have a solid source of supply and the resources to keep innovating, developments that are good for the market as well as these two companies.
OCZ is not a client of Storage Switzerland
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Eric is an Analyst with Storage Switzerland and has over 25 years experience in high-technology industries. He’s held technical, management and marketing positions in the computer storage, instrumentation, digital imaging and test equipment fields. He has spent the past 15 years in the data storage field, with storage hardware manufacturers and as a national storage integrator, designing and implementing open systems storage solutions for companies in the Western United States. Eric earned degrees in electrical/computer engineering from the University of Colorado and marketing from California State University, Humboldt. He and his wife live in Colorado and have twins in college.
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