14 DAY TRIAL // OCZ’s popular Z-Drive line of high-performance PCI Express SSDs for enterprise applications has just received the addition of a new member with the introduction of the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ series of solid state drives.
Just as their name implies, these new PCIe SSDs were specially designed in order be used in cloud computing environments.
The drives use SandForce’s latest SF-2481 controller, which was developed especially for this purpose and will be available in capacities ranging from 300GB to an impressive 16TB.
Thanks to the inclusion of these controllers and a series of other specialized hardware, OCZ’s latest enterprise PCIe drives are capable of reaching transfer speeds of up to 6.5GB/s and over 1.4 million IOPS, making them some of the fastest PCI Express SSDs around.
Furthermore, the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ SSDs also include support for the company’s proprietary VCA 2.0 and SANRAD VXL technologies.
The first iteration of the VCA technology made its debut in the Z-Drive R3 PCI Express SSD and it allows for two or more SSD controllers to be connected together in order to deliver increased performance.
Its main advantage over the regular RAID 0 setups used in multi-controller SSD drives is that it enables the OS to use the TRIM command in order to wipe blocks of data which are no longer in use, thus improving the performance of SSDs using it after large sets of data are written and then erased.
The second generation of this technology builds upon the features of its previous iteration and adds support for the creation of a virtual pool of logical units (LUNs), as well as for the SCSI Unmap command.
"The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe solid state drive delivers game-changing performance and enables clients to process massive data-sets with up to 16 TB of storage capacity on a single, easy-to-deploy card," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.
OCZ’s Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe SSDs should become available in the next few weeks, but no info regarding pricing has been unveiled.