ACADEMIA

OCZ Technology Group and IceWEB Storage Corporation announced that OCZ's SAS-based Talos 2 SSDs and SATA III-based Deneva 2 SSDs have been selected by IceWEB for inclusion in IceWEB's complete line of unified data storage systems. IceWEB leverages OCZ's enterprise-class SAS and SATA SSDs to enable its storage systems with ultra high performance of I/O intensive applications while lowering power consumption and associated cooling costs.

Today's enterprise, mission-critical applications demand very high levels of I/O performance from storage systems that hard disk drives (HDDs) simply cannot provide since they only deliver about 100 to 200 input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance. Therefore, in developing unified data storage systems that yield ultra high-performance, high reliability and availability, low power and cost-effectiveness, IceWEB required solid-state storage as these drives store and access data through NAND flash memory versus from spinning disks. In a typical industry comparison, it takes about 50 HDDs to provide the IOPS performance of one SSD, and an SSD only consumes a fraction of the power of an HDD.

After testing and evaluating competitive SSDs in the industry, IceWEB selected enterprise-class SAS and SATA-based SSDs from OCZ to enable all storage arrays in its unified storage platform with a choice of storage interfaces. Through this process, IceWEB was able to determine that both the Talos 2 and Deneva 2 SSDs from OCZ provided the best read/write IOPS performance, included high reliability and endurance tools to extend usable drive life, and leverages a product roadmap to enable growth within the IceWEB unified platform. The SSDs are also used for IceWEB's IceCAP Cache Acceleration Protocol, automated tiering and pure SSD disk tiers, enabling customers to provision an IceWEB unified system for maximum application performance and capacity as various business requirements dictate.

OCZ Talos 2 SSDs support a 6Gb/s SAS interface, capacities up to 1TB, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors, and are designed specifically for mixed workloads in enterprise environments. They deliver the industry's fastest transactional performance for SAS-based drives supporting 70,000 IOPS (random 4K reads) and 54,000 IOPS for mixed 4K workloads. Unlike many competitive SAS-based SSDs, Talos 2 SSDs are dual ported to provide two redundant data paths, and support OCZ's DataWrite Assurance data protection in case of a sudden power loss adding to the product line's superior data integrity.

OCZ Deneva 2 SSDs support a 6Gb/s SATA III interface, capacities up to 480GB, 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors, and are well suited for write-intensive high performance computing (HPC) environments. Another leading performer from OCZ, Deneva 2 SSDs deliver the industry's fastest transactional performance for SATA III-based drives supporting 80,000 IOPS (random 4K writes) with a maximum throughput of 525 MB/s. DataWrite Assurance data protection is also supported.

In addition to power loss data protection, both Talos 2 and Deneva 2 SSDs feature several enterprise-critical functions not available in OCZ's consumer product lines delivering such best-in-class endurance features as minimal write amplification, intelligent block management and wear-leveling. In addition, Talos 2 and Deneva 2 SSDs include robust security and error correction in the form of AES-128/256 encryption support and advanced error correction coding (ECC), making these drives perfectly suited for a host of data center, cloud computing, web serving and data warehousing applications.

"The inclusion of OCZ SAS and SATA-based enterprise SSDs enables our unified data storage arrays to be used as high-performance primary storage, or as a performance boost for Tier 2 storage, or as a hybrid system that cost-effectively combines HDDs for bulk storage capacity with SSDs for high I/O performance in the same array," said Steven Toole, CMO of IceWEB, Inc. "With complete data protection and performance optimization through OCZ SSDs, our unified storage systems are a great fit for customers that need high availability, as well as enterprise scalability, robust features, reduced power consumption and cooling, all at competitive prices."

"We are very pleased that our Talos 2 and Deneva 2 SSDs have been selected by IceWEB for their entire portfolio of unified data storage arrays supporting cloud and virtual environments, backup and disaster recovery, mission-critical applications, and unstructured data in data center and remote cloud environments," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "The IceWEB unified data storage system platform with OCZ SSDs implemented help optimize storage performance and utilization, reduce storage costs, footprint space, and power and cooling requirements, and simplify storage management."

As part of its unified data storage array portfolio, IceWEB developed four unique solutions that include either Talos 2 SAS-based SSDs or Deneva 2 SATA III-based SSDs, as follows:

• IceWEB 2000 - optimizes file and block data storage utilization in cloud and virtual environments for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

• IceWEB 3000 - provides reliable backup and disaster recovery or high-density storage of unstructured video.

• IceWEB 6000 - provides high availability for mission-critical environments leveraging a highly redundant dual controller and the cost savings and storage optimization benefits from storage virtualization, snapshots and thin provisioning.

• IceWEB 7000 - provides highly redundant and scalable unified storage to support mission-critical applications and unstructured data in the data center and in remote cloud environments.