OCZ and Marvell present the Z-Drive R5 PCIe SSD

OCZ Technology Group and Marvell, both well known makers of high performance products, have recently unveiled a new milestone in the PCIe SSD category, the Z-Drive R5; the industry’s fastest and most versatile PCI Express storage system designed to take the PCIe-based solid state storage to the next level.

“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.”

For this new product, the two companies have jointly developed a native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform dubbed “Kilimanjaro” which allows for completely 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 centre.

The Z-Drive R5 offers an an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution made specifically to accelerate database, enterprise and virtualization applications to high speeds through the combination of the high-performance architecture and OCZ managed software.

With this native PCIe SSD storage, users will experience second-to-none performance flexibility, durability, and enhanced reliability features, which will also allow data centres to rely on a PCIe-based SSD as their primary Tier 0/1 storage solution and a viable end-to-end SAN replacement.

Ideal for businesses in the need of speedy storage, the Z-Drive R5 features:

• Incredible bandwidth capabilities and maximum transactional performance
• High capacities up to 12 TB
• Ideal 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 wide range of systems and servers
• Complete power fail protection option for maximum 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

“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.”

Price and availability are far from mentioned, although those who wish can get a glimpse at Storage Visions 2012 in the OCZ booth (No. 13) where it will officially debut, it will also be showcased at CES 2012 in the Marvell booth (No. 30542 located in the South Hall 3 on the upper level).

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