… And With OCZ Debuts Next Gen PCIe Z-Drive R5 SSDs

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (OCZ) and Marvell Technology Group Ltd. unveiled a fast and versatile PCIe storage system, the Z-Drive R5.

The increased performance, reliability, and endurance of the Z-Drive R5 is designed to take PCIe-based solid state storage to the next level for enterprise environments.

The Z-Drive R5 features a jointly developed ‘Kilimanjaro’ OCZ and Marvell native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, allowing for scalable performance and redundancy while eliminating the need for a separate storage controller, thus reducing the cost to deploy high performance solid state storage systems in the data center.

The native PCIe Z-Drive R5 offers an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution designed to accelerate database, enterprise, and virtualization applications. Combining performance architecture with OCZ managed software, the Z-Drive R5 provides performance, flexibility, durability, and enhanced reliability features, allowing datacenters to rely on a PCIe-based SSD as their primary Tier 0/1 storage solution and a viable end-to-end SAN replacement.

The Z-Drive R5 features:

• High bandwidth and maximum transactional performance
• High capacities up to 12TB
• For all enterprise data types with both compressible and non-compressible files as well as large data sets
• Complete storage subsystem management with OCZ Virtualized Controller Architecture 3.0 software functions
• Compatible with VMware ESXi and ESX, Linux, Windows Server 2008, and OS X to support a range of systems and servers
• Power fail protection option for data integrity
• Full height and half height sizes, ideal for space constrained 1U servers and multi-node rackmount servers
• MLC, eMLC, and SLC NAND Flash options

"We are continually pushing the envelope to deliver innovative PCIe SSDs to address challenges that our clients face when processing and managing ever growing amounts of complex data sets," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "The Z-Drive R5, leverages the powerful Kilimanjaro platform to deliver superior performance, greater capacity, and an enhanced hardware and software feature-set that is unmatched in the industry. This best-of-breed next generation native solution enables clients to eliminate I/O bottlenecks for even the most data intensive server and enterprise storage applications."

"Marvell is excited to work with OCZ on this native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, based on our 88NV9145 silicon," said Alan Armstrong, vice president of Marketing for the Storage Business Group at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. "We believe the PCIe SSD market will rapidly shift to a native PCIe to NAND architecture, and the Kilimanjaro platform represents OCZ and Marvell’s strong collaboration in bringing this highly scalable architecture to market."

The Z-Drive R5 will debut at Storage Visions 2012 in the OCZ booth and will also be showcased at the 2012 CES in the Marvell booth.