News

Flash Moves Beyond the SAN

OCZ showed off VMware-Ready solid state virtualization solutions at VMworld Europe.

• By Christa Ayer
• 10/22/2013

SSD vendor OCZ last week treated VMworld Europe attendees to a peek at its Z-Drive R4 PCI Express (PCIe) SSD Series and VXL cache and virtualization software. This hardware-software combination allows flash data caching and application acceleration into VMware virtualized server platforms.

The solution, designated as VMware-Ready, distributes flash caching resources on-demand across virtual machines, making sure no VM occupies flash that could be better used elsewhere in the environment. The company says the result is optimal delivery, management, and utilization of flash resources and flash caching, regardless of how many VMs are running concurrently.

The system promises all the benefits of virtualization without the need for costly back-end HDD SANs. For example, in support of fault-tolerance, the VXL Software synchronously replicates flash data between Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD cards residing on redundant cluster servers. This ensures that host-based flash is treated as a continuously available storage resource across VMware clusters. This approach assures there is no data loss and no VM downtime even during server, system, or power failures.