OCZ announced its Z-Drive 6000 SSD Series that combines PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technologies with an extensive enterprise feature-set and robust endurance and reliability. The NVMe-compliant Z-Drive 6000 Series is available in multiple configurations supporting a variety of form factors, capacity points, and endurance ratings.

The NVMe specification extends traditional PCIe flash storage to new levels and was architected from the ground up to enable specific benefits of non-volatile memory-based solid-state storage. It features a streamlined memory interface, command set and queue design that delivers faster access to critical data and highly resilient storage capabilities. This enables both system builders and storage vendors alike to develop different parts of a storage ecosystem to a standard specification with broad interoperability support between storage devices, host platforms and software. NVMe is expected to open new opportunities for faster, better and stronger flash-based storage applications while significantly improving PCIe SSD deployments over the next five years.

The Z-Drive 6000 SSD portfolio is well-suited for compute-intensive, analytical, online transactional and cloud-based enterprise applications that require high-performance and low-latency I/O responses, and has the capabilities that drive massive parallelism and high scalability to meet current and future storage requirements. The series includes:

• The Z-Drive 6000 SFF Series for read-intensive applications -- supports 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) and usable capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB. Best-in class performance includes sequential read performance up to 2,900 MB/s; sequential write performance up to 1,900 MB/s, random read performance up to 700K IOPS and random write performance up to 160K IOPS. Includes lowest latencies of 25µs (write) and 80µs (read). Availability is expected in Q2 2015.
• The Z-Drive 6300 SFF Series for mixed workload applications -- supports 2.5-inch SFF and usable capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB, 3.2TB and 6.4TB. World class performance includes sequential read performance up to 2,900 MB/s, sequential write performance up to 1,400 MB/s, random read performance up to 700K IOPS and random write performance up to 120K IOPS. Includes lowest latencies of 30µs (write) and 80µs (read). Availability for 800GB to 3.2TB capacities is expected in Q2 2015 -- Availability for 6.4TB capacity is expected later this year.
• The Z-Drive 6300 AIC Series for mixed workload applications -- supports Half-Height/Half-Length (HHHL) add-in card form factors and usable capacities of 800GB, 1.6TB, 3.2TB and 6.4TB. Availability for the AIC Series is expected in the second half of 2015.

Upcoming features of the Z-Drive 6000 Series support dual port capabilities that enable two host systems to concurrently access the same device or allows for redundancy inside the host. In the event of a system failure, if one of the data paths becomes compromised, the available data path continues operation as if no failure had occurred through the second port without loss in Quality of Service (QoS). Additionally, the Z-Drive 6000 Series supports hot swapping of 2.5-inch drives, pre-set power thresholds and temperature throttling to support many types of enterprise ecosystems.

"Our NVMe implementation yields dramatic boosts in the number of random I/O operations per second that an enterprise system can process and provides the reductions in I/O latency responses that OEMs require," said Daryl Lang, CTO for OCZ Storage Solutions. "As the NVMe standard represents new platform and infrastructure opportunities for OEMs, our Z-Drive 6000 Series delivers leading headline performance, coupled with large capacities, dual port capabilities, hot-swappable 2.5-inch and HHHL add-in card form factors that position this series as the highest performing and most robust for this class of products."

The Z-Drive 6000 portfolio utilizes NVMe to streamline the storage stack and reduce protocol latency to dramatically boost performance and efficiency over previous Z-Drive generations. PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth allows the Z-Drive 6000 family to achieve leading sustained transfer speeds up to 2.9 GB/s while NVMe efficiency enables the Z-Drive 6000 SSDs to read up to 700,000 I/O requests per second and write up to 160,000 operations per second. The Z-Drive 6000 also delivers consistent and predictable low-latency I/O responses of only 25 microseconds for a 4KB write and 80 microseconds for a 4KB read.

The performance delivered by the Z-Drive 6000 family fulfills the stringent requirements of OEM customers for enterprise-class centralized storage systems, server caching applications, virtualized applications, and other applications, and provides new platform and infrastructure opportunities for generating new revenue streams.
OCZ is currently sampling its NVMe-compliant Z-Drive 6000 and Z-Drive 6300 SFF models to key customers and partners.