Stefan Mileschin

About a year and a half ago OCZ announced the acquisition of Sanrad, an enterprise storage solutions company with experience in flash caching. Today we see some of the fruits of that acquisition with the announcement of OCZ's first SQL accelerator card: the ZD-XL.

Enterprise accelerator cards are effectively very high performance SSD caching solutions. Some enterprise applications and/or databases can have extremely large footprints (think many TBs or PBs), making moving to a Flash-only server environment undesirable or impossible. The next best solution is use a NAND based SSD cache. You won't get full data coverage, but if you size the cache appropriately you might get a considerable speedup.

OCZ's ZD-XL is specifically targeted at servers running Microsoft SQL. Although technically the solution caches all IOs to a given volume, OCZ's ZD-XL software is specifically tuned/optimized for SQL server workloads. The ZD-XL only supports a physical Windows Server environment, OCZ offers a separate line of products for accelerating virtualized environments.

The ZD-XL SSD itself is based on OCZ's Z-Drive r4, featuring 4 or 8 SF-2000 series controllers on a single PCIe Gen 2 x8 card, depending on capacity. OCZ doesn't make the NAND or controller, but the card is built in-house. The ZD-XL implementation comes with a custom firmware and software solution, courtesy of OCZ's Sanrad team. The architecture, at least on paper, looks quite sensible.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7165/o...r-ssd-solution