Computex 2011: OCZ Z-Drive R4 88, Eight SF-2281 Controllers in RAID-0

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• kanabalize - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  Over 900000???
  
  Seriously, only for enterprise right?
  
  or the uber rich...

• davegraham - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  RAID 0 is a bad idea for this type of card. Even if they developed some sort of parity schema (R5 or so) or, best case, RAID 1/0, it'd be more applicable. For most of these devices, it's not about capacity, it's about performance.
  
  The other thing I'd mention is that without intelligent software controlling the way in which this device is utilized, it's nothing more than an expensive thrill ride. LSI, for example, developed their CacheCade software to allow for their WarpDrive (a more enterprise version of what you see above) to be used as a caching device or as a pure drive.
  
  cheers,
  
  Dave

• Havor - Sunday, June 12, 2011 - link

  And how is raid 0 more dangerous then a single drive with the same amount of flash chips??
  
  Saying that means you don't trust SF-2281 chips it self, because failure of the NAND chips raid is gone be the same, not more and not less.
  
  And what use to be a drag do in SAP now is a lot more "fun" to do.
  
  Do "I" think the the failure raid of NAND chips will be mouths higher then that of controller and the raid chips.
  
  Sure the extra SF + raid chips are extra links in the chain to failure.
  But that's why you have raid 10 for critical data, and companies like Shell, GE and so on they need for there SAP database speed so they can afford easily raid 10.
  
  But I could be wrong ^_^
  
  But my experience with a large database on SSD is great at least, as I work as a foreman offshore in the oil industry, and use SAP daily the system was so mouths more responsive, I upgraded to SSD at home and it made my system feel a lot quicker, but this was like upgrading from a 386 to a i7 2600 when using SAP.
  
  And also the general experience was so great that they wrote a article about it in the company newsletter. (and was a nice detailed read)
  
  After the SAP database was set over to SSD drives, productivity when using SAP went up 9% the first week and levelled out at 6%.
  (they measured the average time a order was open)
  
  And they calculated that they would save about 10 to 40M Euro a year on man hour's world wide and 1900 Euro's on power with the new servers.
  (think they did it for the power savings, they will brake even in 150y ^_^)
  
  Not bad for 280.000 Euro upgrade, replacing the 12 servers of the old database server, for 2 new SSD ones working mirrored (holding 4 cards each), 2 identical spare ones and 2 HDD based backup servers.
  
  There was a usually average backlog of about 2 days for ordering stuff, that went down to now 2 hours in one month.
  (don't think they are hiring in the purchase department :-)
  
  Ware it use to be a pain using SAP, specialy if you did complex searches, taking up sometimes up to 1min (usually used for a coffee break, costing even more time ;-), you now have the info for the same data back in under 3sec, and all the normal data from average from 3~5 to less then 1sec.
  (it was like upgrading from a old dial-up to cable)
  
  So yeah enterprise costumers don't really look at the price I think

• Etsp - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  Inquiring minds would like to know. Like you stated in the article that while 8 of these in RAID-0 is a neat trick, it's entirely unpractical. Would they be able to provide any details on other RAID configurations that this device supports? RAID 10 Perhaps? Is additional hardware required to support RAID?

• pvdw - Saturday, June 4, 2011 - link

  Remember to think ENTERPRISE. I think this would make for a really good web "read" caching server for an ISP or file download service.
  
  Or how about when you already have 10 load-balanced DB or web servers and need more IOPS?
  
  Or how about multi-layered decision support for a teradata DB?
  
  I'm sure others can come up with more scenarios where data loss isn't really that important.

• dac7nco - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  That has LSI written all over it.
  
  Daimon

• neotiger - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  The RevoDrive supports TRIM? Does Z-Drive?
  
  Also any pricing information?

• JasonInofuentes - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  Pricing probably won't roll out for sometime, and it will be geared at enterprise so this isn't going to come close to affordable for most users.
  
  TRIM? Not behind a RAID.

• neotiger - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  >TRIM? Not behind a RAID.
  
  Not true.
  
  RevoDrive uses RAID and it has TRIM.

• Casper42 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

  I don't know the internal design, but this has Fusion IO competition written all over it.
  
  And as far as what customers could afford to use it (afford the data loss I mean), just go look at pretty much any Fusion IO Marketing slick and you have your answer.
  
  I have seen them personally be installed for Data Mining (Pull a subset of data from a different DB Server that has the redundancy you need) and then run an Analytics package against it to look for trends. And when it comes to Primary DB duties, there are numerous functions that don't require absolute redundancy in place, like Indexes and TempDB.