Storage Visions 2012 – OCZ, Crucial, ioSafe and Intel

OCZ

OCZ and Marvell have teamed up and are showing off the Z-Drive R5 for
the very first time at Storage Visions. The OCZ Z-Drive R5 is the
industries fastest PCI Express (PCIe) storage device. The reason that
Z-Drive R5 features a jointly developed “Kilimanjaro” OCZ and Marvell
native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, allowing 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 center. It uses a PCI-Express Gen3 x8 slot to get up to 1.6M IOPS!

But you don’t have to take our word for it! Here is Daryl Lang, VP of Product Management at OCZ Technologies, telling our readers a little about the new OCZ Z-Drive R5.

The card on display at the show was 8TB in capacity and featured SLC NAND. OCZ will have a MLC, SLC, eMLC versions available at the time of launch. The card is fully PCI Express Gen 3.0 x16 compliant and will be available up to 12TB. OCZ is not talking about prices, but you can imagine that a solution like this will be costly.

We mentioned that the Kilimanjaro platform was a joint project between OCZ and Marvell and here is a picture of the new 88NV9145 controller chip with both companies names on the chip.

The OCZ Lightfoot is designed for mobile applications and will be available up to 1TB in capacities. OCZ informed us that it will also be available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. The OCZ Lightfoot is rated for read speeds of up to 750MB/s and can transfer a HD movie in about 30 seconds.

Here is a closer look at the Thunderbolt connector. The OCZ Lightfoot is about 4-5 months away from being on the retail market.

OCZ was also showing off the OCZ Z-Drive R4 CloudServ RM1616 storage
device and in case you are wondering the name means that it uses x16
PCIe slot and is 16TB. The performance of this bad boy is up to ~1
million IOPS. This has two super scale accelerators and has complete
power fault protection.

This drive uses the full sized PCIe Gen 3 x16 slot.

As you can see this is a dual-slot storage card with four printed circuit boards, but that will vary depending on the capacity.

The back of the card was bare, but there are plenty of solder points for something.

OCZ was showing off an unreleased product called Chiron. This product is staged to be the densest SSD for 4U servers. This 3.5″ drive is 4TB to allow for a total of 96TB in 4U of rack space. Given the density of the drive, the air holes were required to keep the chips cool enough during operation.

The Chiron uses an Indilinx Everex controller and can produce 560 MB/Sec and is capable of just over 100,000 IOPS/Sec. While there is no pricing on Chiron yet, we were told it is about four to five months away.

OCZ also shocked us by showing off what they are calling the Aeon (on)
Drive. This drive uses DRAM as NV memory and is available in capacities
of up to 64GB. The drive has up to 140,000 4K IOPS and >500,000 512
byte IOPS. This drive financial and derivatives trading platforms, and
write intensive applications. The drive has a SATA III 6Gbps interface
and is still in development.

The unit pictured is only 32GB capacity and had a build date on it of this past week. Here we see some unknown connectors on the back of the card.

The Aeon Drive uses the SATA III 6Gbps interface and claims that this drive will basically saturate the capabilities of
SATA III motherboards.