OCZ showcases flash delivery in software-defined data center

SAN JOSE, USA: OCZ Technology Group Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, will showcase its enterprise solid-state virtualization solutions at this year's VMworld 2013 conference and exhibition in Booth #711, Moscone Center, San Francisco, California, from August 25th through August 29th.

Headlining the booth presentations is OCZ's fourth generation Z-Drive R4 PCI Express (PCIe) SSD and VXL Cache and Virtualization software that not only enables flash data caching and application acceleration into VMware virtualized server platforms but delivers and manages flash resources in the software-defined data center (SDDC) to provide all of the benefits of flash without compromises.

Over the last decade, the enterprise data center has been transformed into a more dynamic and efficient platform to meet the changing needs of business applications due primarily to the advent of server virtualization.

While server virtualization delivers impressive data center productivity gains for enterprise servers, the rapid expansion of virtual server deployments has impacted storage and network facilities causing performance bottlenecks and sharp increases in IT administration and infrastructure investment. On host flash matched with software defined flash delivery enables today's virtualized data center to alleviate these bottlenecks and achieve its full potential.

"The software-defined data center vision takes what virtualization software has already achieved for servers and delivers virtualized capabilities to the entire set of physical resources required by an application (i.e. storage, networking & security, compute) so that the resources can be optimally assigned with little to no human intervention," said Dr. Allon Cohen, VP of Software and Solutions for OCZ Technology.

"Achieving this vision requires an automated infrastructure so that applications can be operational in minutes, shortening time-to-value, while dramatically reducing IT expenditures and time devoted to application provisioning and deployment."

To realize this vision, there are three key areas of the SDDC that need to be addressed. The SDDC must be Dynamic to enable provisioning on demand, allocation by need and fault tolerant (FT). It must be Connected so that loads are balanced and can be run any time/anywhere while providing synchronous data replication and high availability (HA) of critical data. The SDDC must also be Simple to install and be able to be managed centrally.

OCZ's proven VXL Cache & Virtualization Software, in conjunction with its flash-based Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD delivers a complete virtual performance system that accelerates VM applications enabling flash resources to be dynamically deployed exactly to the needs of VMs. Business users get faster and more reliable access to the applications and data they need while IT reduces operating and capital costs, and with simplified operations, has more time to devote to data center innovation. OCZ's VXL achieves the SDDC vision through a series of advanced features and capabilities that includes:

* Flash virtualization.

* Dynamic cache allocation.

* Flash fault tolerance.

* Network-exposed flash.

* vMotion without cache loss.

* Flash storage mirroring.

* Application-optimized caching.

* Seamless flash deployment.

* StoragePro central management.