OCZ Z-Drive 6000/6300 NVMe U.2 SSDs Announced

By Nathan Kirsch March 13, 2016

Toshiba Announces Dual Port Functionality Now Available on OCZ Z-Drive 6000/6300 NVMe U.2 SSDs

New dual-port technology enables High Availability, redundancy, and sustained uptime reliability for enterprise applications

SAN JOSE, CA March 10, 2016 Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, announces the immediate availability of dual-port functionality on OCZs award-winning Z-Drive 6000 NVM Express (NVMe)[1] Solid State Drive (SSD) series. The Z-Drive 6000s 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 6000s 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 s, 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.

For more information, visit our product page here.

[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 devices 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.

About Toshiba Corp. and Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC)
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. is an independent operating company owned by Toshiba America, Inc., a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, Japans largest semiconductor, solid state drive and hard disk drive manufacturer and the worlds seventh largest semiconductor manufacturer (Gartner, 2015 Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue, January, 2016). Founded in Tokyo in 1875, Toshiba is at the heart of a global network of over 580 consolidated companies employing over 199,000 people worldwide. Visit Toshiba‘s web site athttp://toshiba.semicon-storage.com.

Information in this press release, including product pricing and specifications, content of services and contact information, is current and believed to be accurate on the date of the announcement, but is subject to change without prior notice. Technical and application information contained here is subject to the most recent applicable Toshiba product specifications.

About OCZ
OCZ is a leading provider of high performance client and enterprise solid-state storage products and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation. Offering a complete spectrum of solid-state drives (SSDs), OCZ leverages proprietary technology to provide SSDs in a variety of form factors and interfaces to address a wide range of applications. Having internally developed firmware and controllers, virtualization, cache and acceleration software, and endurance extending and data reliability technologies, the Company delivers vertically integrated solutions enabling transformational approaches to how digital data is captured, stored, accessed, analyzed and leveraged by customers. More information is available at www.ocz.com.