A maker of solid-state drives has added a new line of high performance devices for servers to its offerings.
OCZ Storage Solutions — which earlier this year was bought by Toshiba Corp. — said Tuesday the enterprise-class Z-Drive 4500 PCI Express SSD Series delivers higher performance and a more robust architecture than the Z Drive R4 series it replaces.
The 4500 Series “represents a consistency with our enterprise strategy as we continue to refine and introduce new products across key interfaces like PCIe using the latest NAND flash process geometry and architectural changes that enable a more efficient design,” Daryl Lang, senior vice-president of product management, said in a statement.
“By integrating our new WXL (Windows Accelerator flash management and caching) Software into the Z-Drive 4500 platform, we are delivering a complete acceleration, caching and flash management solution to the enterprise PCIe storage market with advanced capabilities and a robust architecture as well.”
OCZ says WXL Software enables IT managers to deliver low-latency flash deployable as a local flash volume, a flash cache for HDD volumes or as a combination of both.
The software performs statistical ‘out-of-band’ processing to intelligently cache the most frequently accessed data on an Z-Drive 4500 flash, the company said. A cache warm-up and analysis mechanism enables important analytical jobs to be loaded in advance to assure critical data is available to the application when needed.
The 4500s come in full and half-length edge cards and use 19 nanometer (nm) MLC NAND flash (compared to 25nm in the R4 series). They come in 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB capacities. Maximum read bandwidth goes up to 2,900 MB/s, maximum write bandwidth up to 2,200 MB/s, random 4K block read throughput goes up to 252,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and random 4K block write throughput up to 76,000 IOPS.
The also work with OCZ’s VLX Virtualization Software for flash-based virtualization. It distributes flash cache resources on-demand across virtual machines.
The 4500s also include power loss data protection, data path protection, 128-bit AES encryption, temperature sensing and thermal throttling capabilities.
In addition, the Linux and Windows kernel device drivers have been rebuilt to improve performance and stability. The drivers are packaged with RedHat Package Manager and Debian package files to automate installation.
Pricing for the Z-Drive 4500 starts at US$2,944 for the 800GB model, US$4,757 for the 1.6TB model and US$8,166 for the 3.2TB verison.
(Editor’s note: The pricing numbers have been changed from those first given by the company, After publication  OCZ said newer figures are more accurate.)
