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OCZ, Marvell Debut PCI Express Z-Drive R5 Solid State Solution

by - source: OCZ Technology PR

OCZ and Marvell team up to release the PCI Express Z-Drive R5 Solid State Solution

The 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.

Image Credit: TheSSDReview

The Z-Drive R5 features advertised as the following:

  • Incredible bandwidth capabilities and maximum transactional performance
  • High capacities up to 12TB
  • 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."

The Z-Drive R5 will debut at Storage Visions 2012 and at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show.

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A Bad Day 01/11/2012 1:27 AM
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Incredible bandwidth capabilities and maximum transactional performance

"High capacities up to 12TB"

Do, want...

PrvtChurch 01/11/2012 1:35 AM
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A Bad Day :
Incredible bandwidth capabilities and maximum transactional performance"High capacities up to 12TB"Do, want...


So would I, if they didn't cost THOUSANDS of dollars.

Nikorr 01/11/2012 1:45 AM
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Cool stuff.

freeman94 01/11/2012 1:48 AM
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Alright, now for the costs...

_Pez_ 01/11/2012 1:52 AM
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I see myself buying two of those at a price of $1,500 usd... or stills much money?

palladin9479 01/11/2012 2:28 AM
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freeman94 :
Alright, now for the costs...




If you have to ask.....

and all that.

td854 01/11/2012 2:49 AM
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_Pez_ :
I see myself buying two of those at a price of $1,500 usd... or stills much money?



Needs another zero.

airborne11b 01/11/2012 3:08 AM
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Ya, for those who don't know, these are designed for business. Not to be slapped into your mom's gaming Emachine with a 560ti GPU and some junk AMD cpu for 3 years ago.

Price on these are thousands of dollars for one.

joytech22 01/11/2012 3:17 AM
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_Pez_ :
I see myself buying two of those at a price of $1,500 usd... or stills much money?


td854 :
Needs another zero.



Turn that one into a two and your right on it.

stuckintexas 01/11/2012 4:31 AM
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2.5M IOPS, 7200MB/s, x16 PCIe GEN3, that is Fusion I/O territory. Considering the last gen R4 is $11k for the 1.6TB version, the 12TB R5 is going to be tens of thousands.

Anonymous 01/11/2012 4:34 AM
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IF it's the same price as the previous version, it will cost about the same thing as the Intel new enterprise SSD disk, something like 2000$ for 240gig, that's about 3 time less than the PCIe SSD HP ship.
I was in contact with OCZ for ESX support and I'm waiting for the R5 to buy one and drop some VMed SQL tables on the drive. With the vmware memory licensing it's much cheaper to buy very fast SSD storage than drop RAM on a server.

_Pez_ 01/11/2012 5:39 AM
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joytech22 :
Turn that one into a two and your right on it.


Okey now I do not see myself buying that :(... you killed my wonderland.. LOL I will better stay with HDD's and SSD's.

alyoshka 01/11/2012 7:07 AM
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Wanna try something cheaper but still get the Oomph.... try the Revo..... but just make sure the Mobo supports PCIe Booting..... that's a step ahead of the SSD and yet a step closer to the Fusion.....

dimar 01/11/2012 8:12 AM
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Can't wait for the day when I can buy the 3TB version that can saturate full PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, for $100.

Anonymous 01/11/2012 11:56 AM
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love ocz. they only make product for super rich enthusiasm. or either the cost that you need to sell your kidney to get one. nice.

archange 01/11/2012 12:26 PM
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Benchies, Tom's, or it didn't happen ;)

CaedenV 01/11/2012 3:15 PM
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If they manage to get 12TB on a single board, running at a fraction of the power of a salvo of 15K SAS drives then they could charge whatever they want to, that is just mind-blowingly amazing!
It would take 40 300GB 10K or 15K drives to reach 12TB of data. Assuming a throughput of 150MB/s/drive that would be 6GB/s of sequential read/write performance, which will beat this card (assuming it is a PCIe2 8x slot which caps out at 4GB/s throughput). For IOPS, this card (and even the R4 cards) would easily beat 40 SAS drives at 200IOPS each (for a total of 8,000IOPS vs the R4's 410,000 IOPS, and I am sure the R5 is faster). If this is a PCIe3 card with 8GB/s of bandwidth available then it will be even faster still! Plus when you figure that this single magical card could replace 40 physical HDDs... that's a lot of power, and a ton of space saved!
Now for price, 40 15K 300GB drives can be found on newegg for ~$450ea (I am assuming also this price is also inflated due to the floods just like the consumer drives are), totaling $18,000. The R4 3.2TB drive starts at $20,000, which means a 12TB drive would be ~$50-60,000, which is 3x the price of the SAS solution, and a rough equivilant in performance in sequential throughput. For IOPS however (again using the R4 specs as we do not know what the R5 is yet, except that it will be better) you get .4IOPS/$ with the SAS setup, and 6.8IOPS/$ with the R5 for the same amount of storage space, but a small fraction of power usage, and even smaller fraction of physical space used. I think that says it all for the pro markets, if this is anywhere near $60,000 for 12TB (or even north of $100,000) it would be more than worth the cost compared to the performance gained. Simply amazing!

CaedenV 01/11/2012 3:20 PM
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Just realized, I didnt even take into consideration the lessened noise and cooling factor for a setup like this! Data center cooling is insane, and 15K drives are not exactly quiet, especially when you have 40 of them lol. Imagine cooling a data center with a simple/normal AC instead of moving to the artic circle like FB did to help cut their cooling bill.

brando56894 01/11/2012 5:48 PM
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I hope this "works with Linux" better than the RevoDrive 3 does. I just got one for christmas and was highly disappointed to read that the device BARELY works with Linux as OCZ only provides kernel modules for CentOS and doesn't plan to support anything else in the future. A Canadian user actually had to create drivers for it and had it submitted to the 3.2 branch. OCZ's VCA technology still doesn't work in any other distro besides CentOS/Red Hat, so it just shows up as two SSDs instead of one. What's even crappier is that OCZ doesn't mention this minimal support ANYWHERE on the product page!

palladin9479 01/12/2012 2:48 AM
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CaedenV wrote :

Just realized, I didnt even take into consideration the lessened noise and cooling factor for a setup like this! Data center cooling is insane, and 15K drives are not exactly quiet, especially when you have 40 of them lol. Imagine cooling a data center with a simple/normal AC instead of moving to the artic circle like FB did to help cut their cooling bill.




We stopped using 300GB 15K SAS drives over a year ago. We now use 1TB 15K SAS for most of our SAN. 1TB per disk has become the standard now. Redo your numbers with that in mind.

These cards would be amazing for various virtual suites, typically ESXi setup. Their not going to replace your datacenter storage pool for the simple fact that their not separate from the host devices. That 12TB is glued to a server, and if that server goes down or experienced a power fault then all 12TB is instantly non-available. Where as with SAN's and shared storage, multiple host systems will have access to the same storage pools and if one goes down the data is still accessible.

josejones 01/24/2012 6:50 PM
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When will the PCIe SSD Interface support PCIe 3.0?

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