OCZ Comes Roaring Back with NVMe SSD Debut

The OCZ Z-Drive 6000It’s really something to see a company recover from a big challenge, and signs of that happened this week with OCZ’s introduction of a new NVMe-based PCIe SSD they call the Z-Drive 6000 series.

This replacement for the company’s Z-Drive 4000 series is a complete redesign with an obsession for performance.  OCZ tells me that they moved from a 2-hop design to a 1-hop by using the PMC Princeton PCIe SSD controller, and have passed the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Labs’ compliance tests to NVMe 1.1B compliance.

But how does it perform?  Well the 1-hop design helps reduce latency (which is just starting to overshadow IOPS in users’ minds) and the latency of this SSD is significantly lower than competing NVMe SSDs: between 25-30μs, figures that OCZ tells me are very consistent, a big plus for enterprise applications.  As for IOPS, the device can perform under a 70/30 Read/Write load at 330K.

The 6000 series is provided in both standard MLC and eMLC for those who want the security of eMLC and are willing to sacrifice a little performance to sleep better at night.

This product is a good fit for the market needs, and shows how devoted OCZ and its parent Toshiba are to providing high performance in the SSD marketplace.

 

LSI SandForce SSD Controllers Move the Knee in the Curve

LSI SandForce SF3700 Controller DuraWrite ImprovementsLSI’s SandForce has just rolled out its SF3700 family of four SSD controllers aimed at the Entry Client, Mainstream Client, Value Enterprise, and Enterprise Storage marketplaces. Performance is impressive, with worst-case random PCIe IOPS at 150K read/81K write and 94K/46K for the SATA interface.

The SF3700 family builds on the division’s first two product families by adding a choice of PCIe or SATA interfaces, LDPC error correction, and a boosted set of flash management features.  The SSD Guy will explore this last point after highlighting the other two.

By providing both PCIe and SATA interfaces LSI is directly addressing the future: PCs are aiming to move to the m.2 SSD specification rather than Continue reading “LSI SandForce SSD Controllers Move the Knee in the Curve”

Seagate’s Big Intro: Four New SSD Families in One Day

Seagate's Four New SSD FamiliesSeagate this week updated its SSD portfolio with four new product families and now claims to have the broadest portfolio of storage products in the industry.  This announcement squarely places the company in all the key SSD markets: SATA, SAS, and PCIe.

Here’s Seagate’s new lineup:

Webinar: How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?

How Many IOPS Webinar Cover SlideEarlier today Tom Coughlin and I presented a BrightTalk webinar in league with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to discuss our joint report: How Many IOPS is Enough?

The report is based upon a survey that asked IT managers about their enterprise IOPS requirements.  The webinar gives a taste of the report’s contents, and explains the survey methodology.  During the course of the webinar and at the end Tom and I answered a number of listener questions relating to the content.

The presentation also includes a little plug for SNIA’s client IOPS survey which is being run by downloading a program called the Workload I/O Capture Program, or “WIOCP.”

A replay of this webinar is available on the BrightTalk website.

The presentation was well received by our audience.  Have a listen.

IBM to Invest $1B in Flash Promotion

The following is excerpted from an Objective Analysis Brief e-mailed to our clients on 15 April, 2013:

Comparison of 3-Year Operating Costs: Flash vs HDD (Wikibon)On April 11 IBM kicked off “The IBM Flash Ahead Initiative”, committing to spend more than $1 billion for flash systems and software R&D and to open twelve IBM Flash Centers of Competency around the world staffed with flash experts armed with flash systems to help clients test drive flash in their own situations.

This follows from IBM’s August 2012 agreement to acquire privately-held Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a very low profile manufacturer of high-performance flash-based memory arrays and PCIe SSDs. TMS is the world’s oldest SSD maker, founded in 1976, to manufacture RAM-based replicas of HDDs. About four years ago TMS used its Continue reading “IBM to Invest $1B in Flash Promotion”

Seagate Jumps into PCIe SSDs with Virident

Seagate adds PCI Express SSDs from ViridentSeagate Technology has made a $40 million investment in Virident Systems and has already begun to offer Virident PCIe SSDs to its customers.  This was announced on January 28 by the two companies.

Objective Analysis issued an Alert a few hours after the announcement to our clients. Some items we pointed out: Continue reading “Seagate Jumps into PCIe SSDs with Virident”

Storage Developer Conference Focuses on SSDs

SNIA's 2012 Storage Developer ConferenceLast week the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted its 2012 Storage Developer Conference (SDC).  There was a strong focus on SSDs at this forum, with 15 papers, one keynote, and a panel devoted to the subject.

Consider that the 2008 SDC was the first such conference in which SSDs were discussed.  This year I commented to another participant: “Some day we will look back on this transition and be amazed at how suddenly SSDs became fundamental to the way storage is configured!”

Many of those papers and keynotes made it clear that the PCI Express (PCIe) interface has Continue reading “Storage Developer Conference Focuses on SSDs”

Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market

Intel's 910 PCIe SSDIntel has gotten into the fast-growing and lucrative market for PCIe SSDs.  The company has announced a PCIe SSD, the 910, that provides the high performance you would expect of a PCIe drive with the quality guarantees that customers expect of Intel.

Who could blame them?  Fusion-io has become a Wall Street darling for creating the PCIe SSD market, and still rides it to continually growing revenues.  LSI is fascinated by the growth of its Warp Drive.  Micron attained a significant design win at EMC, Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has had success in its own narrow markets, and Virident, OCZ, and STEC have also participated in the PCIe SSD’s market growth.

Intel’s 910 consists of four Hitachi SAS SSD Continue reading “Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market”

OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks

OCZ's PCIe Z-DriveSSD maker OCZ has been on something of a tear recently, introducing three new solid state storage products in three weeks:

  • Two weeks ago the company introduced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe SSD, designed for the data center, in single-card capacities ranging from 300GB-16TB.  This product can transfer data at multiple gigabytes per second rates to deliver over a million IOPS.
  • Last week saw the introduction of the OCZ-SANRAD VXL enterprise storage accelerator, after OCZ’s January acquisition of SANRAD.  This product is flash cache acceleration software for VMware ESX and Citrix Xen virtualized environments that allows Continue reading “OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks”

LSI Acquires SandForce

On October 26 LSI announced its acquisition of leading SSD controller maker SandForce.  The privately-held firm has made significant strides in the development of high-performance controllers that have gained great popularity through a string of impressive benchmark results in the online reviewer community. Continue reading “LSI Acquires SandForce”