OCZ Technology and Marvell today unveiled the industry's fastest PCI Express (PCIe) storage system, the Z-Drive R5.

The Z-Drive R5 features a jointly developed "Kilimanjaro" OCZ and Marvell native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform, allowing for scalable performance and redundancy while eliminating the need for a separate storage controller, thus reducing the cost to deploy solid state storage systems in the data center.

The native PCIe to NAND flash "Kilimanjaro" platform is leveraging Marvell's 88NV9145 controllers. Each Marvell 88NV9145 controller supports a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface, ARM-based processor, external Double Data Rate (DDR) interface and four NAND flash channels with up to four Chip Selects (CSs) per channel. In addition, each 88NV9145 can support up to 128GB NAND capacity and has been tested by Marvell to achieve up to 93,000 4K random read IOPS and 70,000 4K random write IOPS.

OCZ's PCIe Z-Drive R5 offers an intelligent managed solution designed to accelerate database, enterprise, and virtualization applications. It is available in capacities of up to 12TB and has been designed for enterprise data types with both compressible and non-compressible files as well as large data sets. OCZ has hinted at a doubling of the SandForce-based R4's performance, which could take us into the three million IOP realm.

The drive is also compatible with VMware ESXi and ESX, Linux, Windows Server 2008, and OS X to support a wide range of systems and servers. Power fail protection option ensures data integrity, the drive comes in both full height and half height sizes and it is available in MLC, eMLC, and SLC NAND flash versions.

The Z-Drive R5 will debut at Storage Visions 2012 in the OCZ booth and will also be showcased at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the Marvell booth.