See also:-
OCZ
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com ,
the OCZ Report
(newsletter) and
OCZ
SSD summary (pdf) - a useful document which provides top level specs and
internal controller details for OCZ's very large SSD range. |
|
editor's introductory comments:- February
2013
OCZ entered the SSD market in
March 2008 and
has been in StorageSearch's
top 10 SSD companies
list for 8 consecutive quarters.
OCZ's highest ever rank was
#4 - the position still occupied in the
Q4 2012 Top SSD
Companies List - published in January 2013.
OCZ is 1 of only 4
companies in the top 10 list which also has its own
flash DSP IP
ECC SSD technology in currently shipping products. |
|
| "At some stage I think the company (OCZ) is going to have to
decide what markets it's really in - and exit the least profitable segments"
- editor's comments July 6, 2011 - the Top 20 SSD OEMs - in
2011 Q2 |
|
Editor:- November 5, 2012 - re OCZ - the new
/ short version.
Even before the recent events which have forced
the need for a change of CEO, reorganization and sharper business focus within
OCZ - it's been clear for the past year that OCZ has become a significant
factor in the enterprise
SSD component market - especially in the customer segment which I called -
dark matter (hard
to reach but potentially big SSD customers) - and small to medium size oems -
because OCZ's sales culture made the company's products easier to acquire and
design into new apps (for this type of customer) than alternative enterprise
SSDs from Micron,
STEC,
Virident etc.
My
reading and interpretation of what's going on now is that OCZ's enterprise
PCIe SSDs line and related software will most likely remain at the heart of the
product line because there's a market gap for a company like OCZ which is easier
to do business with if you're a smaller or medium size oem customer. |
|
|
Who's who in SSD?
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - November 25, 2011
(deep breath and begin)...
OCZ
are 1 of many companies in the
notebook SSD
market, 1 of more than 100 companies in the
2.5" SSD market, 1
of more than 40 companies in the
PCIe SSD market, 1 of
30 companies in the SSD
controller and IP market... 1 of (soon to be hundreds) of companies in the
auto-tiering SSD market,
an innovator in the hybrid
SSD market - (but I haven't finished yet - good job I took in that deep
breath at the start) - OCZ also make SSDs with
SAS,
SATA and
USB interfaces... And they
are also in the top 20
SSD companies and fastest
SSDs lists too. (Phew!)
I could have made this list longer.
Or
I could have made it shorter by writing about the complementary market sets.
For example - I could have said - "OCZ doesn't sell
rackmount SSDs,
RAM SSDs
FC SAN SSDs or
hard military SSDs."
But
then I would have had to add an important qualifier at the end. - "Yet".
And then maybe added - "As far as I know."
OCZ
are involved in so many segments of the SSD market it's hard to keep up - even
though the company and its products are very accessible.
Keeping up
with OCZ is like tracking about 20 other SSD companies - if I blink - I find
they're in another market.
Can all these SSD market experiments
succeed?
Probably not.
No single company can be best at
everything. But OCZ do make it easy to buy their products and they have wide
visibility into which SSD segments are hot for business and which are not.
I'd guess they understand the comparative attractions of these SSD market
segments better than most
SSD analysts -
because OCZ is right in there in the shopping cart - so they don't have to wait
to read what's been selling in the past quarter in market research
reports published by the usual
terabyte talliers.
It looks to me that OCZ are spinning the handles in many parallel
SSD market slot machines. If there are going to be any winners - they'll
be among the first to know. And if a segment looks like a loser - OCZ
knows where it can get a better game.
To conclude - I'll use the
summary I wrote recently in my Q3 2011 top SSD companies roundup.
"If
there is a science to the art of selling and pragmatically marketing SSDs -
then OCZ is the master of it..."
I currently talk to
more than 300 makers of SSDs and another 100 or so companies which are
closely enmeshed around the SSD ecosphere - which are all profiled here on
the mouse site.
I learn about new SSD companies every day, including
many in stealth mode. If you're interested in the growing
big picture of
the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many
SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD
content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I
hope you'll find it it useful too. |
|
|
OCZ recent milestones in
SSD market
history
In March 2009 -
OCZ unveiled a
PCIe SSD at
CeBIT. The
Z
Drive uses
MLC flash and has
capacity of 1TB.
But later:- OCZ disclosed that the sustained
write speed is a mere 200MB/s - which is 4x slower than single slot
PCIe SSDs from
Fusion-io and
Texas Memory Systems.
In
April 2009 - OCZ
unveiled new
2.5"
SATA flash SSDs for MacBooks. OCZ also published
a
list of MacBooks which the company says are compatible.
Also in
April 2009
- OCZ
unveiled its
1st miniPCI-Express
compatible SSDs. Aimed at
notebooks OCZ miniPCI-E options include:- 16GB or 32GB capacity, and 2
interface options.
SATA
models - have R/W speeds 110MB/s and 51MB/s respectively .
PATA
models - have R/W speeds 45MB/s and 35MB/s respectively.
In May 2009 -
OCZ
launched its
fastest 2.5"
consumer
SATA SSDs -
the
Summit Series - with 200MB/s sustained write and 250GB capacity.
Although
not the fastest SSDs
in the industry, they are more than 2x as fast as OCZ's Core series
launched less than a year before.
In July 2009 -
OCZ was ranked #12 - just
outside the Top 10 SSD
companies - Q2 2009 - in the 9th quaterly edition of this popular feature
based on search volume.
Also in July 2009 -
OCZ
announced
faster versions of its
2.5"
SATA flash SSDs. By increasing the internal cache speed by 8% the Vertex
Turbo now delivers read and write speeds clocking in at up to 270MB/s read and
210MB/s write. These are fast for
consumer SSDs -
but see the
fastest SSDs list
for much faster devices.
In November 2009 -
OCZ
announced
it will launch a new SAS
SSD family based on SSD
SoCs from SandForce
which will probably be shown at CES in
January 2010.
Also in November 2009 -Symwave
announced that
its USB 3.0 controller
has been designed into a new
flash SSD by
OCZ - which will be shown
at CES in January 2010.
In March 2010 -
OCZ
announced
it's shipping a 32GB 2.5"
MLC
SSD for under $100.
R/W speeds are
unremarkable - at a mere 125MB/s and 70MB/s respectively - but the main point
of this launch - according to OCZ's CEO, Ryan Petersen - was to
publicize the price
point and show what the company is doing "to make SSDs more affordable
to end-users."
Editor's comments:- You get exactly what
you pay for in
SSD pricing. The
big problem is knowing what you want. OCZ's new
Onyx
is a very low capacity, slowish
notebook SSD
which is unsuitable
for server apps. But it does appear to be a good price today according
to
this
comparison. (It may not look so good later.)
Also in March 2010 -
disclosed it
has closed $15
million in funding to support its growing SSD business.
In April
2010 -
OCZ launched the
Z-Drive
R2 - a bootable PCIe
MLC SSD with upto 2TB capacity and upto 950MB/s sustained write throughput.
R/W IOPS are
29,000 and 7,200 respectively - an order of magnitude slower than the fastest
PCIe SSDs today - but nevertheless useful for many applications - unlike the
original Z-Drive (March 2009) which so slow that it couldn't be regarded as a
serious contender.
In June 2010 -
OCZ unveiled the RevoDrive
a bootable
PCIe SSD with R/W
speeds up to 540MB/s and 530MB/s respectively and 75,000
IOPS.
In July 2010 - the architectural weak points of
OCZ's early PCIe SSDs were
criticised in an interview with
Fusion-io's
CEO published on StorageSearch.com.
In August 2010 -
OCZ announced
plans to wind down its commodity
DRAM business and focus
more resources on SSDs
In
October 2010 - OCZ
achieved its best ever listing in the quarterly
top 10 SSD oems list
based on SSD search volume in Q3 2010.
Also -
OCZ
launched a
2nd generation version of its
RevoDrive
- a bootable legacy
architecture
PCIe SSD with R/W
speeds up to 740MB/s and and 120,000
IOPS which
uses 4x SandForce
SF
1200 controllers.
In November 2010 - StorageSearch.com
learned from reliable sources that
OCZ has acquired
intellectual property assets from
Solid Data Systems.
In March
2011 -
OCZ announced it had
signed a definitive agreement to acquire
Indilinx for for
approximately $32 million of OCZ common stock.
In June 2011 -
OCZ was one of several
compatible companies named in
FlashSoft's launch of
its auto tiering SSD
software.
In August 2011 -
OCZ
launched a
hybrid
PCIe SSD - the
RevoDrive Hybrid - which integrates 100GB SSD capacity along with an onboard 1TB
HDD and
SSD ASAP / auto hot spot
cache tuning controller capable of 910MB/s peak throughput and upto random
write 120,000 IOPS (4K) at an MSRP under $500. This was reviewed later (Oct
2011) in an
article
in HotHardware.com .
In September 2011
- OCZ
announced it
is supplying custom 7.5mm high 128GB SATA SSDs which use its Indilinx
Everest SSD controller to LG for use in its in
LGP220
ultra-thin notebooks.
OCZ also launched its
Synapse
Cache Series 2.5" SATA SSDs for Windows 7 environments. The new SSDs
(64GB / 128GB, R/W speeds upto 510/550MB/s, 80,000 IOPS) integrate
NVELO's
Dataplex
cache / SSD ASAP
software to dynamically manage the SSD in conjunction with standard
hard disk drives. When
used to support a pre-existing terabyte hard drive - the overall performance for
popular PC benchmar tasks can be 4x to 6x faster - as the
software learns the where the hot data is for that user's PC - according to
benchmarks and data in
OCZ's
related white paper (pdf)
. No data migration or OS installation is required.
In October
2011 OCZ agreed to
acquire the UK
Design Team (approximately 40 engineers located in Abingdon) and certain
assets from PLX Technology
which will enable OCZ to accelerate the development of its next generation of
fast SSDs - while also reducing development costs.
In November 2011
- OCZ launched 2 new models
in their full height PCIe SSD range - aimed at the Windows consumer market -
the
RevoDrive
3 Max IOPS (120GB to 480GB costs $549-$1,399) and
RevoDrive
3 X2 Max (240GB to 960GB costs $849-$2,499) with 4KB random write
performance of up to 245,000
IOPS, and
R/W rates upto 1,900MB/s and 1,725MBs/ respectively.
OCZ also started sampling
dual port 6Gbps
SAS SSDs in a smaller
form factor - the
Talos
2 SAS SSD provides upto 70,000 4K
IOPS
(75R/25W) and upto 1TB capacity in
2.5" (previously
only available in 3.5"
size).
In December 2011 -
OCZ reported
preliminary
revenue for the past quarter (ended November 30) to be in the range $100
and $105 million - an increase of approximately 90% compared to the
year ago quarter and a 30% increase compared to the immediately preceding
quarter. The company attributed much of this to its growing traction in the
enterprise SSD market.
In January 2012 -
OCZ
announced is
now demonstrating at the Storage
Visions 2012 Conference new
PCIe SSDs - which use
SSD controllers
jointly developed with Marvell
(instead of - as in previous models - controllers from
SandForce).
OCZ also
announced it
has acquired SANRAD for
$15 million.
In February 2012 -
OCZ today
announced
imminent shipments of new high capacity
PCIe SSDs optimized
for cloud apps. The
Z-Drive
R4 CloudServ (which uses 16x
SandForce 2581 SSD
processors) has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full height
card and is supported by auto-caching
SSD ASAP fuctionality
(based on the acquisition of SANRAD's
VXL) and OCZ's
VCA 2.0
which together enable host migrations without loss of performance or
interruption of service.
In April 2012 -
OCZ launched what the
company says - is the industry's
fastest IOPS
2.5" SATA MLC SSD
family (across a range of apps) - the
Vertex
4 (based on OCZ's own
regular RAM cache
Everest 2 controller) delivers 95K / 85K random
IOPS (4K
blocks) and 535 MB/s throughput.
In March 2013 - OCZ
announced
the general availability of
VXL
1.3 (SSD software) -
which enables PCIe SSD
flash volumes (on the company's
Z-Drive R4) to be
virtualized and synchronously mirrored, so they are continuously available to
support HA and
FT services from within the virtualized host without the need for any
back-end SAN or storage
appliance. |
| . |
| more SSD articles on
StorageSearch.com
|
- SSD Myths
- "write endurance" - In theory the problems are now well
understood - but solving them presents a challenge for each new chip
generation.
- the SSD
Buyers Guide - summarizes key SSD market developments in the past
quarter and has a top level directory of SSD content.
- PCIe SSDs
- lists oems who market PCIe SSDs, and news and market commentary. We've
reported on PCIe SSDs since the first products shipped in 2007.
- RAM v Flash
SSDs - which is Best? - I asked experts from 10 leading SSD companies to
write their views about the strengths and weaknesses of these 2 types of SSD
technologies. The article is updated from time to time - and you may be
surprised to learn that in some heavy duty server apps RAM SSDs are cheaper
to buy than flash - (as well as being faster).
- SSD controllers &
IP - this is a directory of merchant market SSD controller chip technology
providers.
- SAS SSDs - our
market research uncovered a strong demand for SAS SSDs years before any such
products actually existed. Vendors were slow coming into this market for a
number of reasons. This article includes a timeline of the SAS SSD market - and
lists significant vendors.
|
| |
| . |
|
|
|
StorageSearch.com
is published by
ACSL | |
... |
| OCZ earns award for SQL
flash cache |
Editor:- May 8, 2013 - OCZ today
announced
that its ZD-XL SQL Accelerator earned the
Best of Interop
award in the data center and storage category.
ZD-XL (unveiled
at CeBIT last February) is a bundled package for Windows servers which
includes an SQL optimized flash caching software appliance which leverages
the low latency of an associated
OCZ PCIe SSD card.
The
judging committee, comprised of 16 IT editors and analysts who reviewed
nearly 150 entries. | | |
| ... |
 |
| ... |
|
|
| ... |
| OCZ's newest new PCIe SSD |
| Editor:- January 7, 2013 - OCZ already has several
PCIe
SSD families aimed at different markets. This week at
CES the company will demonstrate another
new range called the Vector series which is based on its Indilinx Barefoot 3
controller. | | |
| . |
|
|
| ... |
| OCZ slims catalog and
headcount |
Editor:- October 31, 2012 - OCZ today
announced
it has started EOL procedures to discontinue approximately 150 product
variations to improve its business efficiencies.
Excluding
production personnel, the company has reduced its global workforce by
approximately 28%. Total personnel at the Taiwan production facility,
including outside contractors, has been reduced by approximately 32%.. OCZ says
it will continue to take further actions aimed at reducing overall costs and
improving operating results.
Editor's comments:- OCZ had so
many SSD product variations it was hard even for people like me (with the time
and incliniation to look deeper) to understand where they all fitted into the
competitive landscape and relative to each other. A smaller focused product line
will make it easier for customers to recognize what they need too. | | |
| ... |
| OCZ's new VXL software
release includes fault tolerant support for arrays of PCIe SSDs |
Editor:- October 23, 2012 - OCZ today
released
a new version (1.2 ) of its
VXL
cache and virtualization software - which provides high availability,
synchonous replication and enhanced VM performance across arrays of the
company's Z-Drive R4 PCIe
SSDs.
The company says this assures that host-based flash is
treated as a continuously available storage resource across virtualized clusters
and yields no data loss and no VM downtime even during complete server
failures.
"By combining the power of storage virtualization and
PCIe flash caching, and by working centrally with the hypervisor rather than
with each local VM, we have developed a solution that takes full advantage of
flash without losing any of the benefits associated with virtualization,"
said Dr. Allon Cohen,
VP of Software and Solutions, OCZ. "VXL's ability to transparently
distribute flash resources across virtualized environments provides IT
professionals with a simple to implement solution..." | | |
| ... |
OCZ's
founder and CEO resigns - what now?
maybe forging ahead in less
different directions... |
Editor:- September 17, 2012 - OCZ today
announced
the resignation of the company's founder and CEO Ryan
Petersen.
Alex Mei,
Executive VP and CMO has been named as Interim CEO, effective immediately.
Editor's comments:- September 19, 2012 - I spend my
whole working day reading, writing and talking about the
SSD market. And
even when I'm on staycation - as I was recently - this subject is never very far
away from my thoughts. You may think it's sad - but I find it very very
interesting and wouldn't have it any other way.
As the SSD village has
growing in visibility I get a lot more questions from tourists and newcomers
asking the way to SSD
street. And for reasons which you an easily guess - in recent months
OCZ has replaced
STEC and
Fusion-io as the
company which most SSD investors - who are contacting me for the first time -
ask most questions about.
In nearly all these cases the best I can do
is simply to repeat and summarize comments which I've written before in various
articles and give them the links.
I was engaged in one of these
exchanges recently - both shortly before and on the day after the news
announcement (above). Here's a small extract from what I said.
(before
Petersen's departure)
Reader... is OCZ really as important as the CEO
says?
(short answer) - Yes.
(actual reply) - I don't know what he said.
OCZ entered our Top
SSD Companies List in the
2nd quarter of 2010
- You can see what I said about OCZ in each quarter in that series.
Those rankings are based on typically around 250K to 300K of the most
significant people in the SSD industry in each quarter. If you look back on
the series you'll see it has a good predictive track record of which companies
are important which goes back before most of them entered the market and before
there was any public financial info to compare. There's a simple reason.
Where do you think the biggest customers in the market come from? Our readers
have always been a significant influence in the enterprise market.
(after Petersen's departure)
Reader.. has OCZ outgrown its
founder and what do you really think might be behind it?
Editor:- I
had already said in July on these pages and in reply to some other readers -
although not this one - who had asked me to comment on speculative OCZ
acquisition rumors - that based on what I had read on the web about the sums
being quoted I couldn't see the logic.
My thinking was that OCZ
- like any self respecting SSD company - would value itself much more highly
than whatever these speculative acquirers - if they were real - might
realistically offer after they had calculated a discount to factor in what
they would get versus how it would fit in with what they already had.
(Editor's
actual reply) - Many leading SSD vendors in the market today stand at a point
where they can follow several different directions for growing their businesses.
Choosing that single main course instead of just maintaining
unfocused momentum in too many directions on a rising tide of SSD revenue is a
tough business challenge because with limited resources saying Yes to one route
is the same as saying No to many others which may have once before seemed
attractive.
OCZ isn't alone in facing these challenges. But its earnings history
means it has more limited degrees of freedom unless it can get a buy-in from
stakeholders who can carry the burden of meeting the company's aspirations.
No single SSD company can be best at everything. There's too much
competition. It's best to focus on a few things and do them well. The company
has done a credible job transitioning from its consumer routes into the
enterprise.
As you may know from my past (negative) articles about the state of
the consumer SSD
market with a few exceptions such as
memory makers and related
chipmakers who need to secure their long term futures or consumer systems
makers like Apple who want to protect their core platform IP - I can't
understand why any SSD maker would want to have a big exposure in the consumer
SSD market if they had the choice to be somewhere else.
I think
that's why
SanDisk bought
Pliant and
FlashSoft. And
SanDisk is a consumer memory company. | | |
| ... |
| OCZ reports
54% SSD revenue growth |
Editor:- July 10, 2012 - OCZ today
reported
that its SSD revenue for the recent quarter (ended May 31, 2012) grew 54%
year on year to reach $106 million.
The company also said it had
achieved record bookings in this quarter of nearly $140 million.
Editor's
comments:- OCZ also moved up 1 notch in the Top SSD Companies List in Q2
2012 to its best ever position #4. | | |
| ... |
| OCZ
interview on DigiTimes |
| Editor:- June 8, 2012 - If you've ever wondered
what's the main difference between OCZ's enterprise and
consumer SSDs, and why the company has so many models - you'll see these
questions (and more) answered by OCZ's CMO, Alex Mei, in a
recent interview
in DigiTimes. | | |
| ... |
| welcome to the new alchemy
- converting SSD software to gold |
Editor:- May 29, 2012 - a new
blog today on StorageSearch.com asks -
where are we now
with SSD software?
For
over 30 years
the SSD market operated in a software near vacuum. Why did it take so long
for the systems software industry to do anything useful with SSDs? |
 |
And why are seemingly
insignificant little SSD software companies today being gobbled up at prices
which seem to have no connection to what they could ever earn from license
sales? ...click to read the new
article | | | |
| . |
| "Putting that
into a historical context:- OCZ anticipates that its SSD revenue
(FY13) will be bigger than the entire SSD market generated in 2008 - when the
size of the market passed 100 SSD companies..." |
| Editor's comment in
SSD news | | |
| ... |
|
|
| . |
 |
... |
Editor:- my very short list of useful
SSD videos includes
this one from OCZ
(Feb 2012) which demonstrates
SSD
vs HDD in a VDI bootstorm. It illustrates how fast virtual desktops
power up - on the SAN - when 1/2 are connected to HDDs and the other 1/2 are
accelerated via one of the company's Z-drive PCIe SSDs. | | |
| . |
| OCZ ships 16TB CloudServ
auto caching PCIe SSD |
Editor:- February 14, 2012 - OCZ today
announced
imminent shipments of new high capacity
PCIe SSDs optimized
for cloud apps.
The
Z-Drive
R4 CloudServ (which uses 16x
SandForce 2581 SSD
processors) has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full height
card and is supported by auto-accelerating
SSD ASAP
functionality (based on the acquisition of
SANRAD's
VXL) and OCZ's
VCA 2.0
which together enable host migrations without loss of performance or
interruption of service. | | |
| ... |
| "In March 2008 -
OCZ entered the SSD market with the launch of its first 2.5" flash
SSD - taking the number of SSD oems listed on StorageSearch.com at that time to
70." |
| ...from:-
Charting the
Rise of the SSD Market | | |
| ... |
 |
| ... |
| don't all PCIe SSDs
look pretty much the same? |
When you look at the
photos and headline specs for high speed PCIe SSDs - it's easy to come away with
the impression that they all look the same and have about the same performance.
After
all - how different can they be?
But don't let the experience of the
2.5" SSD market -
in which clusters of consumer SSD vendors use the
same or similar
controllers and hover
close together inpopular
(consumer) performance rankings - give you the wrong idea about
PCIe SSDs.
In
this market the performance limits and capabilities of the SSD aren't set by an
old hard disk interface
and package limitations.
In the PCIe market the products you get are
limited only by the imagination of the designers - tempered by the guesses of
marketers who are trying to predict the optimum (most salable) features for an
ideal SSD. |
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