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OCZ Storage Solutions, a Toshiba Group Company and leading producer of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), is announcing their new enterprise-class solid-state drive (SSD) geared toward read-intensive applications such as high-volume deployment hyperscale, distributed computing and web-hosting computing environments. The SATA-interface Saber 1000 series represents a solution to demanding critical customer business challenges, and is supported by a feature set that is enterprise optimized, offers large storage capacities, and helps IT departments achieve a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
The Saber 1000 series features Toshiba’s latest A19 MLC NAND flash coupled with OCZ’s internally developed, proven Barefoot 3 NAND controller and firmware. The Barefoot 3 controller provides consistent sustained I/O performance, across all capacities, to help accelerate enterprise storage applications. The Saber 1000 will be available in capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB.
According to Daryl Lang, CTO at OCZ Storage Solutions, “In designing the new Saber 1000 Series we listened to our customers to meet their growing needs for a server-class SSD that is optimized with the right balance of features, performance and cost. With the Saber 1000 Series, customers now have an ideal storage solution in which to build an all-flash datacenter, one that is able to efficiently process high volume enterprise and hyperscale workloads.”
OCZ’s Saber 1000 Series of SSDs are an excellent choice for read-intensive usage scenarios, including read caching and indexing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Video-On Demand (VOD), online archiving, media streaming, cloud infrastructure, front-end web servers, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and more. A mere 3.7 watts of power is typically consumer in an active state, which helps to both shrink datacenter energy needs and create additional savings via reduced cooling requirements.
George Crump, Founder and Lead Analyst for Storage Switzerland states that “In hyperscale and distributed computing environments, a majority of the servers are performing high read activity tasks. For these read-intensive environments, an SSD, like OCZ’s new Saber 1000 that provides high capacity, predictable performance and enterprise-level support – at favorable acquisition costs – is an ideal fit. This product provides an excellent opportunity for OCZ to expand its enterprise footprint into this evolving market segment.”
In a steady-state condition, whereby the Saber 1000 960GB SSD is writing, erasing and re-writing data continuously over its full capacity, the performance for larger block sequential reads and writes, and also for smaller block size random reads and writes, is top-of-class competitive. 128K sequential reads speeds are stated as (up to) 550 MB/s, with 128K sequential write speeds of (up to) 470 MB/s. Random 4K reads speeds are stated as a robust 98,000 IOPS, with random 4K write speeds of 20,000 IOPS.
In the event of a sudden power loss or interruption, the Saber 1000 Series utilize a technique that OCZ refers to as Power Failure Management Plus (PFM+), which delays the SSD circuitry long enough to ensure each SSD’s integrity so that it can be fully operational again when power has been restored. Since most enterprise and hyperscale severs are deployed in clusters, PFM+ ensures that once power is restored and the server cluster re-stabilizes, all Saber 1000 SSDs will return back to the condition they were in at the instant of power loss.
OCZ has raised the bar for SSD monitoring and management by utilizing their value-added StoragePeak 1000 SSD Management System. This gives IT managers the ability to centrally monitor and administer connected Saber 1000 SSDs (as well as other OCZ enterprise-class storage solutions) from a web-based management interface. StoragePeak 1000 is a network-accessible management system that securely connects to multiple hosts (running either Linux or Windows operating systems), and provides a cross-platform view of the OCZ SSDs that are connected to servers, storage arrays or appliances, and includes user-configurable alerting systems that allow IT to identify potential problems and initiate corrective actions at an earlier stage.
OCZ is backing the Saber 1000 Series with a five-year warranty. You can view the OCZ press release announcing the Saber 1000 Series of enterprise SSDs in its entirety here; and you can view the Saber 1000 Series product page here.
