Home Enterprise OCZ-SANRAD VXL Enterprise Storage Accelerator Launched

OCZ-SANRAD VXL Enterprise Storage Accelerator Launched

by Brian Beeler

OCZ has announced the OCZ-SANRAD VXL enterprise storage accelerator, the first co-branded output of the SANRAD acquisition which occurred earlier this year. OCZ-SANRAD VXL is available now and is designed to deliver flash caching and acceleration with support for VMware ESX, HyperV and Citrix Xen. VXL allows either the Z-Drive R4 or Z-Drive R4 CloudServ to be utilized as an accelerator for traditional iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage.


OCZ has announced the OCZ-SANRAD VXL enterprise storage accelerator, the first co-branded output of the SANRAD acquisition which occurred earlier this year. OCZ-SANRAD VXL is available now and is designed to deliver flash caching and acceleration with support for VMware ESX, HyperV and Citrix Xen. VXL allows either the Z-Drive R4 or Z-Drive R4 CloudServ to be utilized as an accelerator for traditional iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage.

OCZ-SANRAD VXL

OCZ is leveraging the SANRAD technology to target traditional Tier-1 SANs that are both expensive and not space or power efficient. By leveraging PCIe Z-Drive R4’s, the VXL acceleration layer can be used to drive anything from application virtualization to virtual desktop infrastructure at speeds up to 25 times faster than a hard drive based SAN. 

The benefits of the integrated technologies go beyond speed though, the VXL software supports seamless migration of virtual machines from one host to another withsout loss of performance. VXL also fully supports vMotion and guarantees cache migration between ESX servers without loss of performance. Further, VXL does not require OS agents to be installed in each virtual machine, simplifying management and deployment. VXL works with any OS supported by the hypervisor including all modern versions of Microsoft Windows, all major Linux distributions, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD among others.

OCZ announced the acquisition of SANRAD in early January, for a seemingly superb price of $15 million, all in OCZ stock. In the enterprise, owning IP and showing both performance and reliability are key drivers to customer qualification and eventual purchase of the product. With this acquisition OCZ has clearly added meaningful technology and engineering resources to their portfolio as they battle with Fusion-io, LSI, Micron and others for this key segment of the enterprise storage business. 

VXL Software Overview

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