OCZ Technology Group and Marvell on Friday unveiled the industry's fastest and most versatile PCI Express storage system, the Z-Drive R5, which is powered by the jointly-developed Kilimanjaro platform. The increased performance, reliability, and endurance of the Z-Drive R5 is designed to take PCIe-based solid state storage to the next level for enterprise environments.

The native PCIe Z-Drive R5 offers an intelligent, hardware-meets-software managed solution designed to accelerate database, enterprise, and virtualization applications. Combining high-performance architecture with OCZ managed software, the Z-Drive R5 provides second-to-none performance, flexibility, durability, and enhanced reliability features, allowing datacenters to rely on a PCIe-based SSD as their primary Tier 0/1 storage solution and a viable end-to-end SAN replacement.

"We are continually pushing the envelope to deliver innovative PCIe SSDs to address challenges that our clients face when processing and managing ever growing amounts of complex data sets. The Z-Drive R5, leverages the powerful Kilimanjaro platform to deliver superior performance, greater capacity, and an enhanced hardware and software feature-set that is unmatched in the industry. This best-of-breed next generation native solution enables clients to eliminate I/O bottlenecks for even the most data intensive server and enterprise storage applications," said Ryan Petersen, chief executive of OCZ Technology.

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.

OCZ Z-Drive R5 will be available later this year and will be largely custom-made for particular orders due to very high-cost of solid-state storage solutions. Among other things, the Z-Drive R4 will offer up to 12TB of storage, next-generation OCZ virtualized controller architecture 3.0 software functions, support for all enterprise data types with both compressible and non-compressible files as well as large data sets, complete power fail protection option for maximum data integrity, MLC, eMLC, and SLC NAND flash memory options as well as support for VMware ESXi and ESX, Linux, Windows Server 2008, Apple OS X, etc.

"Marvell is excited to work with OCZ on this native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, based on our 88NV9145 silicon. 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," said Alan Armstrong, vice president of marketing for the storage business group at Marvell Semiconductor.

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

Tags: OCZ, Marvell, SSD, PCI Express, NAND, eMLC, MLC, SLC, Flash