OCZ Technology Group, a leading designer of high-performance solid-state drives, has announced the latest Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD solution for enterprise and OEM clients. The Z-Drive R3 updates the existing lineup with greater performance, reliability, and design flexibility with a new compact footprint for server applications, and is the first SSD to officially deploy OCZ’s proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) technology.

Creating a ‘virtual super controller,’ OCZ’s VCA pools the resources of two or more NAND flash controller interfaces, MCPs, storage processors, and a physical interface complete with customizable features and interface options that eliminates the need to re-spin expensive silicon. VCA is able to address NAND flash in an innovative way through the use of a massively parallel array, eliminating bottlenecks by increasing both read and write speeds up to the theoretical interface limit while keeping access latencies to a minimum. With VCA, IT architects can now take advantage of enterprise-rich features that are not available when utilizing traditional raid cards with an array of SSDs in their servers. With the Z-Drive R3, which makes use of VCA technology, clients can now overcome this obstacle and deploy a single solid state drive that not only delivers exceptional bandwidth but also beneficial enterprise features including Trim, SMART monitoring, native command queuing (NCQ), tagged command queuing (TCQ), power fail management, and wear-leveling.

The Z-Drive R3 takes the Serial ATA/SAS bottleneck out of the equation and by implementing PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface and multiple SSD processors to deliver up to 1GB/s transfer speeds and 135 thousand 4k random write IOPS for maximum productivity in an professional IT environment. Available in up to 1.2TB capacities using a variety of NAND flash, this drive features a half-height and half-length form factor to maximize its application potential for servers and racks. OCZ will also introduce a new full height card that offers even higher performance and up to 250 thousand 4k random write IOPS.

OCZ’s complete range of Z-Drive R3 is now available in SLC, MLC, eMLC NAND flash in 150GB, 300GB, 600GB, and 1.2TB capacities to fit the demanding needs of today’s storage networks, data centers, and supercomputers.

“The Z-Drive R3 lineup of PCI-E SSD’s delivers superior performance and flexibility to enterprise clients who require high bandwidth coupled with high transactional performance,” said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ Technology.

Tags: OCZ, SSD, Flash