Toshiba Announces Dual Port Functionality Now Available on OCZ Z-Drive SSDs

(Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung)

SAN JOSE, CA – March 10, 2016 – Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces the immediate availability of dual-port functionality on OCZ’s award-winning Z-Drive 6000 NVM Express™ (NVMe)[1] Solid State Drive (SSD) series. The Z-Drive 6000’s addition of dual port connection enables two host systems to concurrently access data from the same storage device or provides a redundant access path to the drive, providing SAS-like features such as High Availability (HA)[2] that storage architects have come to rely on.

Now dual-ported, the Z-Drive 6000 series represents a complete solid-state storage solution that supports the real-time I/O needs of business-critical enterprise applications and virtual infrastructures which require high bandwidth and low latency performance, but also need redundancy. The Z-Drive 6000’s dual port capabilities enable redundant data access that eliminates a single point of failure and when two hosts are using the same drive, maintains Quality of Service (QoS)[3] in an event when one data path is compromised. In addition to the dual port upgrade, the Z-Drive 6000 series now includes feature enhancements such as multiple namespaces, non-binary sector sizes, and self-encrypting drive (SED) with Crypto Erase[4].

“OCZ is excited to offer our customers this robust new firmware that enables the Z-Drive 6000 series to be a compelling solution, not only for low latency, high performance compute applications, but now also for storage-class applications where the additional enterprise class features are required to compliment latency and performance,” said Daryl Lang, Vice President, SSD Product Enablement, Toshiba America Electronic Components.

The Z-Drive 6000 is a consistently high-performing NVMe SSD with sustained I/O performance over 700,000 IOPS for 4K random read[5], consistent low-latency of 30 µs, and features selectable power envelopes. In addition to dual port functionality, the U.2-based Z-Drive 6000 SSDs are hot-swappable, further distinguishing this next generation PCI Express[6] technology from the traditional add-in-cards of the past. Designed for a wide range of storage infrastructures, this Z-Drive SSD series is available in 800GB[7] to 6.4TB capacities in both read-intensive and mixed workload models.

Customers who have deployed final hardware and firmware Z-Drive 6000 SSDs and wish to upgrade to dual port firmware should contact OCZ Product Management for more details.

[1] NVMe and NVM Express are a trademark of NVM Express, Inc.

[2] High Availability (HA) refers to infrastructure that cannot tolerate fault and therefore unavailability of a particular storage device is not acceptable – it needs to be available all the time e.g. Financial market

[3] Quality of service (QoS) refers to storage device’s consistent efficiency in responding to host I/O requests

[4] Crypto Erase refers to erasing the encryption key through which the data has been encrypted in the SSD thereby preventing unauthorized access to the data

[5] Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size.

[6] PCIe and PCI Express are a registered trademark of PCI-SIG

[7] One Terabyte (1TB) = 1,000 Gigabytes (GB). One Gigabyte (1GB) means 109 = 1,000,000,000 bytes using powers of 10. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes, and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity will also be less if the computer includes one or more pre-installed operating systems, pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.