OCZ sets up its flash stall in the enterprise bazaar OCZ is taking on Fusion-io in the enterprise flash array market and adding a flash-disk drive hybrid to its range for workstation use. This SSD company is powering up into the enterprise from its consumer flash beginnings. There are two products due to be announced shortly, we understand, based on demonstrated prototypes seen …
....It's been a pleasure to get to know you over the years. From binning parts for review sites to come on top to creating a cartel with SandForce regarding firmware to consumers, it's fairly plain to see that the leopard, regardless of the colour, still maintains it's spots.
I've certainly enjoyed seeing wide spread tails of failed Revo Drives, of Data Corruption, and funky designs that most IT professionals wouldn't even think to include in their designs. For throwaway product, you're certainly tops. However, when you start to trespass in MY pool, I'm going to make sure you understand what you're in for.
A.) Reliability. It rarely has to do with what type of NAND you're using. It comes does to design for reliability. We like to call it RAS in this playing field but you'll probably understand it better as "keeping those RMAs under control." You haven't, in the short time you've decided to play in this space, convinced anyone that your demons have been exorcised here. Try googling "OCZ Revo Corruption" and...well, see what happens.
B.) Design. Designing for sustaining failures is one thing but coming to market with full height, full length SSD boards when your more agile competitors like Fusion I/O and LSI are doing half-height, half-width is stupid. Density demands designs that are solid, that consume less space, and hit efficiency benchmarks...Can't see that happening for you, especially with the Revo Hybrid design.
C.) Development. In the enterprise space, if you don't have solid developers working for you, engaging with your OS partners, and actually supporting your customers, you're dead. So far, you've done nothing with your tools outside of terrible Windows and (dare I say it?) Linux TRIM drivers. That's another one to google..."OCZ Driver support." Oh, btw, where's your VMware driver support? Fusion I/O and LSI have them...
D.) Performance. You can put a Ferrari shell on a Pontiac Fiero and still have a completely crappy care. Looks good but doesn't really meet the same thing. Doesn't matter about the price either...why spend money on a "johnny come lately" that has almost NO proof that they can hack it in this space and, who is known through word of mouth, to have an EXCEPTIONAL failure rate on hardware? I don't care if you can do 2.7GB/s through a x8 PCIe 2.0 bus if you're going to fail me next week. Again, not about the NAND, it's about sustaining.
E.) Support. Along the lines of development, support is huge. LSI and Fusion I/O put people on the ground to WORK with folks to integrate products. You've got no such capability...frankly, your "plug and pray" model is not designed to scale anywhere beyond the big box store...
I probably could continue but given the plethora of EXCELLENT options (TMS, Crucial, LSI, Fusion I/O, Violin, Unigen, et al) why would I settle for mediocre?
cheers,
Dave
PS> I highly respect Dr. Michael Schuette. He's probably the only reason why I'd give you the time of day...
Perhaps you're in a different market than what OCZ are initially aiming for? I agree the RMA rates for newly released hardware is higher with OCZ than, say, Intel. That's a known fact.
Also agreed that they lack drivers tho there's been no need for drivers so far as they used an off the shelf PCI-X bridge which already has support in *nix. Now, the new revodrive range does use custom firmware so presumably would need a driver.
You can't really blame them for not releasing drivers for an unreleased product.
For what it's worth, despite the higher RMA rate I've personally had zero stability issues in the year I've been running a Revodrive 24/7. So sorry, it's not the case that a working drive might just fail on you in a week.
At the end of the day you should know what you're buying. If you want and need full enterprise support with all the bells and whistles OCZ might not be for you, not with the current offerings anyway.
If, however, you are a SMB that can fit an entire production database on a single PCI-E card and get 350K iops? Here's my wallet, thank you very much.
Zef,
OCZ has made overt intimations that it's attempting to move to enterprise from SMB. Revodrive is a solid SMB class product and I certainly applaud your use of it without issue. the problem is when you start way downmarket and attempt to move up, your track record (aka "victims") become inextricably attached to who you are.
Do Fusion I/O, LSI, etc. have issues with their products? Absolutely, but the way they've surrounded their respective products makes OCZ look like a used car dealer in delivery. You can "buy" your way into the hearts and minds of folks (power of psychology at work) but unless you're there to deliver a sustaining ecosystem for those products, you're going to be out of luck. That, imho, is where OCZ has failed miserably and where they're going to need to dramatically improve. There are of course other things that need to be corrected (as enumerated above) but, this seems to be the most salient for now.
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