 Welcome to Linus Tech Tips at CES 2013. Our trip to the show this year is powered by Corsair, maker of quality PC components and peripherals. Our trusted storage partner is Seagate Technology, and our trusted networking partner is Linksys. In the OCZ suite on the consumer side, we start with the Vertex 3, so this is a San Force-based drive. Honestly, the problem with something like a San Force-based drive at this point in time is that pretty much everyone and their dog has a San Force drive, so you just have to rely on add-ons like extra warranty or, you know, just sort of the general brand perception in order to drive sales. So Vertex 4 was an obvious thing for OCZ to do after they acquired Indolinks. It does use a third-party controller, the actual physical controller on the chip, but it uses an Indolinks firmware, so they're calling that the Everest 2 platform, and it achieves performance that in almost any case is as good as the Vertex 3, but in cases where you're dealing with incompressible data is actually better, so it's a more consistent experience. Right here, we have the latest drive that OCZ's launched. So these two are going to be the ones they're more focused on moving forwards with their Indolinks technology inside. This one not only uses an Indolinks firmware to control the SSD itself, but it also has the Barefoot 3 controller, which is the first silicon that was actually designed in-house by OCZ to deliver the best possible performance. This drive took something along the lines of 18 months to bring to market, so they were already working on this six months before CES last year. It has a five-year warranty, and it has industry-leading performance. It is right up there with any other 2.5-inch SSD drive because that is pretty much as good as we can do for a 2.5-inch SATA 3 drive at this point because the SATA interface is getting pretty close to the limit. So let's talk about what we can do if we move beyond the SATA interface. Now, we've seen Revo Drive products from OCZ in the past, and they're doing away with that branding this time, or maybe they're not. It looks like there's a... Oh, yeah. Specifications are preliminary and subject to change. So this is the Vector PCIe. This is going to use two Indolinks Barefoot 3 controllers. It uses 32 NAND chips. It comes with cloning software. It has a five-year warranty. It's going to be available in capacities up to 1 terabyte, and it uses a PCI Express Gen 2 4X interface, giving it a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 2 gigabytes per second. Now, in the real world, it's capable of achieving about 1 gigabyte per second, and you're going to see that on the screen to my right, your left, but there's a lot of overhead involved in the PCI Express interface. So really, to get ahead of this in terms of performance, they'd either have to add more lanes, making it an 8X card, or move to PCIe Gen 3. Now, with these storage devices, there's a lot of validation that goes into them because most PCI Express slots on motherboards, on the motherboard manufacturer side, are only really validated with mainstream stuff, like graphics cards and sound cards. So in the past, there have been some finicky issues. So moving ahead to the newest technology that at this point is only even supported on Intel and not even on the AMD side might not have made sense. And honestly, looking at previous generation products, you didn't see the same kind of scaling going from two controllers to four controllers that you saw going from one to two. So speaking of the performance scaling from one to two, you can see that compared to what a single drive is able to do on the SATA 3 interface, we're able to see consistent performance above sort of anything above about 32 kilobytes, where you're sitting around, well, still above 800 megabytes per second reads and writes. This drive can consistently deliver about 1,000 megabytes per second reads and writes. So this is comparable to something that I had to build for myself using an LSI card that cost me about 700 bucks. And back in the San Force 1 days, I needed eight drives to achieve that kind of performance. So we're only a few generations ahead of that, but we're already looking at performance that's basically space age compared to what we had not that long ago. In our Vector SSD unboxing, we talked about how OCC is changing their image, redefining their processes internally, and trying to refocus right now. So let's have a look at sort of the existing generation of enterprise SSDs I don't know if you guys are familiar with these or not, but this one was actually at CES last year already. It's available in up to 3.2 terabyte capacities, and I know the internet loves to talk about sort of the one terabyte drives that are out or are coming out, but the reality of it is OCC has had things like, you know, 3.2 terabyte drives on PCIe, 800 terabyte drives using a SAS interface on 2.5-inch form factor for actually quite a while now. So it's interesting. I mean, this is all that stuff that we've seen before, but I have Jerome here from OCC to tell us about something that's actually all new and uses, unlike these previous generation solutions, which are using SanForce controllers, SanForce-driven kind of firmware updates, this guy right here is actually using OCC's own intellectual property. So tell us about the Intrepid 3. Right, so thanks. So this is our Intrepid 3 products. This is our next generation SATA product. So as you mentioned, this is using our in-house controller, our Everest 2 controller, and this is going to be an evolution of our existing SATA products like our Deneva 2. So with Intrepid 3, you're going to get higher performance for sequentials, also higher performance for random input-output operations per second, and this one's also optimized for incompressible data. Deneva 2 is optimized for compressible, and Intrepid 3 is going to give you really great performance for incompressible data. So these two solutions are potentially complementary to each other. Yes, that's very accurate. Okay, so I mean, there's a lot of guys that make SSDs, so I think the differentiation really comes from a few different factors. So number one is the variety of the solutions. Number two is going to be the support that's provided. Number three is quality of the components that are being used. And number four is going to be sort of how you guys differentiate yourselves in the market and sort of that X-factor thing. So this is something we discussed on our live stream. We do live streams every Friday night when OCC announced this, but OCC has a solution now for accelerating volumes, whether it's using a PCIe solution, a SATA solution, a SAS solution, on Linux platforms as well as what other platforms. So why don't you tell us, we're going to wait for this demo to restart at the beginning, and then we're going to get Jerome to walk us through it. Okay, so here we're showing OCC's new solution for Linux acceleration. This is our LXL platform. So what we're doing here is we're showing in our Storrs Pro XL management software. You can see we have the Neva and a Z Drive OCZ volumes installed. And what we're doing here is we're selecting the existing volumes that you want to accelerate. So we're picking the OCZ volumes here as cache volumes. And our LXL software automatically, you know, pre-discovers all the volumes. And here you can see the existing volumes that you're going to accelerate. So we're selecting those. So what we've done so far is we've already selected the OCZ volumes that we use as cache. Now we're selecting the volumes to be accelerated. And here you can see we're selecting the policies to be used for the acceleration. So essentially these will tell you what data to put in the cache, what's the hot data. So we have some pre-configured algorithms as well as you can select custom algorithms. So now there we've selected the volumes. Now they're accelerated. And we're going to move over. You can see in the summary all the four volumes that were installed are now accelerated with the OCZ, the Neva, and the OCZ. To be clear, guys, the volumes that are being accelerated here are going to be mechanical volumes that were assigned, that an SSD volume is then being assigned to cache. Now I can tell you guys right now looking at the interface for this, assuming it's going to work this way in the final model. Check this out, guys. 15,000 total IOPS per second, which is much better than you can do with any mechanical volume, as we're about to see when they actually turn the volume acceleration off. This is much easier than what I've seen in implementations from LSI and Adaptech in their RAID storage managers and not nearly as restrictive because you can take SATA drives, you can take PCIe drives, you can clump them together, you can separate them apart. So you could say you've got a 1.6 terabyte Revo drive. You go, I want 1 terabyte for dedicated SSD storage. I want 600 gigabytes that's going to actually cache a mechanical volume I have somewhere else on the server. This is extremely exciting because up until now there's been no real caching solution for SSD available on Linux at all, in spite of that being where most of the server data is actually dealt with. Now is this just going to be Linux or are you guys going to have other solutions as well? We're going to have other solutions as well. We already have a solution for VMware. It's called VXL. The Linux solution is called LXL, as we've discussed. And we're going to also have a Windows solution, which will be called WXL. Thanks so much, Jerome. This has been very helpful and don't miss any of our CES 2013 coverage here at the show. And as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips. It's powered by Corsair, Seagate Technology, and Linksys.