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

"High capacities up to 12TB"
Do, want...
So would I, if they didn't cost THOUSANDS of dollars.
If you have to ask.....
and all that.
Needs another zero.
Price on these are thousands of dollars for one.
Turn that one into a two and your right on it.
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.
Okey now I do not see myself buying that
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!
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.