OCZ Demos 2 Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe SSDs at 12 GB/s and1.4 Million IOPS – CES 2012 Update

Today OCZ invited us up to their penthouse suite at the posh Aria hotel to demo some of their latest and greatest technology.

OCZ surprised us with a decidedly enterprise-oriented direction in their newest offerings. With OCZ dominating the consumer space, it is only natural that they want to expand into the enterprise sector. SSDs only account for 1-2% of the enterprise server storage, so there is room for tremendous growth in this area.

OCZ had announced earlier in the day that they had acquired SANRAD, an Israel-based provider of flash caching software and virtualization-centric technology. Imagine our surprise when we were greeted with a testbed and SANRAD engineers already in place!

First, the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ was highlighted sporting some ridiculously powerful performance. These devices are certainly a generational leap in technology, as they outstrip anything else on the market by large margins.

With 2 of these devices working in tandem they showcased an amazing throughput at the 128 Sequential benchmark of over 12GB/s!

When asked to showcase 4k Random Read speeds we were greeted with over 1.4 Million IOPS!  This performance is actually limited more by the platform itself than the Z-Drive R4 devices that are connected.

Finally, there were some new faces in the room, and these were engineers from SANRAD, demoing their latest technology used in tandem with the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ.

This new technology allows for some great advancements in the server space. Utilizing on-the-fly caching of Virtual Drives allows for extreme performance enhancement. One of the demos involved acceleration of a virtual drive from 42MB/s to over 610 MB/s in under 5 minutes time! This type of technology is a great acquisition for OCZ as the continued frantic pace of SSD growth in the server space is centering on caching of HDD base volumes.