OCZ Storage Solutions - a Toshiba Group Company and leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced that its entire PCIe-based enterprise-class Z-Drive SSD Series are now certified as DataCore Ready. Through this certification program, OCZ's Z-Drive SSD Series has demonstrated product compatibility with DataCore's SANsymphony-V software platform by meeting the verification criteria set by DataCore through the successful execution of planned functional tests.

SANsymphony-V is DataCore's ninth-generation storage virtualization solution and is currently being used in more than 10,000 customer sites worldwide. The software is designed to maximize IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilization by virtualizing storage assets. Once deployed, it seamlessly manages and scales data storage architectures, combines all available storage into a single storage pool and virtualizes it delivering large performance gains through a hardware-agnostic model.

"We are pleased that OCZ's Z-Drive SSD Series is now DataCore Ready certified as this enables our joint customers to confidently utilize one of the fastest PCIe-based SSD products to further optimize application performance on software-defined architectures," said Carlos M. Carreras, Vice President of Alliances and Business Development at DataCore. "In the software-defined data center, virtualization, automation and system efficiencies must be driven through software, requiring a cost-effective approach to managing storage growth while getting the most out of hardware investments."

Both the Z-Drive 4500 Series and Z-Drive R4 Series are driven by OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA), deliver industry-leading sustained performance for MLC-based PCIe edge cards and support 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB usable capacities. The latest Z-Drive 4500 Series enables even higher performance in comparison to the R4 Series, leveraging 19 nanometer MLC NAND flash, a more robust architectural design, and an advanced suite of enterprise-class drive endurance and data reliability tools required by today's IT managers.

"DataCore's SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform is highly regarded in the market and complements our Z-Drive SSD Series with performance optimization, virtualization and caching, among other key capabilities," said Erik Jones, Director of Product Management, Enterprise PCIe SSDs for OCZ Storage Solutions. "We are pleased to achieve the DataCore Ready certification as our high-performance Z-Drive SSD Series are ideally suited for our joint customers and the physical infrastructures supported from all of the major storage manufacturers."