OCZ Introduces New Solid State Drive That Clocks 80,000 IOPS

OCZ Technology Group is introducing a new SATA III-based solid-state drive (SSD) that delivers 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), 30,000 more IOPS than its predecessor. OCZ says the Deneva 2 line of SSDs is targeted at mission-critical enterprise applications, where fast reading and writing of data to and from storage is essential.

The Deneva 2 is a SATA III drive that provides peak throughput of 6 Gbps. SATA III is an industry standard for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment storage. The 80,000 IOPS performance on the Deneva 2 compares with 50,000 IOPS in the Deneva 1 line. OCZ provided performance comparisons for Deneva 2 along with those of competitors and stated that the STEC Mach 16 SATA II product delivered only 15,000 IOPS, the Intel 510 SATA II only 8,000 and the Micron C400 SATA III 50,000.

However, Jim Handy, an analyst with the research firm Objective Analysis, cautions that these benchmarks are not from an independent firm because there aren’t yet firms that do performance benchmarks on SSDs, as there are for, say, semiconductors. Nonetheless, Handy says, high-speed SSDs are in high demand, and his firm forecasts SSD unit shipments to grow by 83% annually in the near future as they become the preferred alternative to older, slower hard disk drives for storage.

"That’s quite a benchmark," Handy says of the 80,000 IOPS performance. "The SATA interface is usually thought of as being a client interface, and people who want to get the kinds of IOPS that you get out of that usually will use a Fibre Channel [FC] or SAS [serial-attached storage] interface. But because SATA III has really high-speed operation, apparently it’s quite capable of matching the speed of SAS and Fibre Channel.”The Deneva 2 line is meant for enterprises struggling to control the "big data" that is overwhelming their organizations, says Kevin Wagner, VP of product management for enterprise solutions at OCZ.

"The problem that a lot of IT groups have to deal with is how to manage all of that data and how to provide the storage for that data," Wagner says. "There are a number of advantages to SSD over HDD in that environment. One of them is that you’re going to get much greater performance in terms of read-write access and throughput to get more data on and off of the drives."

Another advantage of SSD is that it can be phased into an enterprise's existing HDD environment, says Alex Mei, executive VP and chief marketing officer of OCZ. The OCZ Deneva 2 drives can be included in an enterprise’s tiered storage environment where they can work with FC/SAS HDDs, SATA HDDs or other storage formats.

"We really believe that SSD can work alongside hard drives. They can function well together, and that tiering model makes it a lot easier to deploy these solutions," Mei says.

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