B&C: Hi Tobias, first of all, thank you for this interview. Can you explain to our readers what your position and roles are at OCZ?
TB: Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you and be able to give your readers some insight to OCZ Storage Solutions. I joined OCZ back in 2006 and am responsible for global PR and marketing.
B&C: OCZ was born in 2002 as supplier of high-performance memory modules, and immediately became one of the main actors in this market. However, during its own life, OCZ reinvented itself many times: as PSU supplier, as gaming peripherals supplier, as heat sinks supplier and, lastly, as SSD supplier. Can you explain us why OCZ has changed so much times during these years, and why in these sectors?
TB: Over the years we have indeed manufactured a variety of products and targeted different market segments. As you mention, we had a great standing in the enthusiast segment and therefore it was logical to look at additional products for our customer base. As part of the growth strategy we also decided to look at bigger market segments such as mainstream gaming. DRAM became a very price sensitive market and margins continued to decline so it was important to diversify.
In 2008, OCZ was among the very first companies to launch a consumer SSD. Since then we have established a large IP and patent portfolio both through in house development and acquisitions. It was an important strategic decision a number of years ago to discontinue our DRAM business and put all our focus and resources on SSDs. This has enabled us to develop the market leading products we have today.
B&C: OCZ is now a company specialized only on Solid State Drives (SATA and PCIe). During the latest years a lot of customers have complained about the longevity of your products. This issue is happen, in my opinion, because you tried to sell your SSDs at lower price as much as possible: a low price is an excellent bait, but also a low price means that there is something of cheap inside. So, the question is: will you continue to adopt the same strategy in the future with the consumer products, or will you change it?
TB: I don’t think it is as simple as just looking at the price. To answer your question, I want to look back a number of years:
As I mentioned earlier, OCZ was amongst the first companies to launch a consumer SSD back in 2008 and with that we were the first manufacturer to launch a number of controllers such as SandForce and JMicron. Being first to market certainly has benefits however you usually also have to live with a number of bugs that are eliminated over time. When you are the brand which is the first to market and have a majority of the market share it will reflect negatively on your brand.
Today we are in a different position: we have all IP in-house and therefore full control of the development and manufacturing in every aspect. Our current products which are based on our Barefoot 3 controller and utilize 19nm Toshiba NAND have by far the lowest return rate of any product we have launched so far which is a confirmation of the development, testing and quality procedures we have focused on.
We changed our strategy a number of years ago when we discontinued over 150 products and decided to focus on the mainstream and high-end market with the Vertex, Vector and RevoDrive. This was certainly the right step to take, as a result we have managed to greatly improve the quality, performance and feature set of our SSDs.
B&C: Samsung sells SSDs only with its own NAND Flash memories. SanDisk sells SSDs only with its own NAND Flash memories. Crucial (Micron) sells SSDs only with its own NAND Flash memories. Will Toshiba do the same, or will OCZ use NAND Flash memories from other suppliers? Will Toshiba sell some low-budget SSDs with its own brand?
TB: Toshiba will continue its own development, production and marketing of Toshiba branded SSDs while the new company, OCZ Storage Solutions, will also continue to sell its own OCZ branded SSD products through our well established global sales channels.
We have transition all our consumer products to 19nm Toshiba NAND and our latest enterprise products, the Intrepid SATA SSD and the Z-Drive 4500 PCI-e drive are also based on Toshiba.
During the second half of this year Toshiba is going to release a TLC based SATA drive which we are going to sell under the OCZ brand as well. This will enable us to gain back market share in the value segment as well.
B&C: Today OCZ can make a 100% Home Made SSD: controllers (thanks to PLX Technology's Abingdon R&D department and Indilinx Company), NAND Flash memories (thanks to Toshiba Semiconductor), and firmware (thanks to, again, Indilinx Company). Also, thanks to acquisition of SANRAD Inc. (2012), OCZ can provide a complete Enterprise solution (Hardware + Software). Can you talk to us about the genesis of the latest Enterprise products of OCZ (e.g. ZD-ZL SQL Accelerator, Z-Drive 4500, etc.)?
TB: You summarized that well. Today we are the only fully-integrated SSD provider solely focused on SSD products.
When you look at our enterprise solutions, and I say solutions because we design our hardware and software to solve specific storage challenges, we are covering a wide customer base in the enterprise / OEM, SMB and workstation market.
When you look at the specific offerings we have today, we developed these for the following markets / Applications:
- Z-Drive 4500 – Database / Data Warehousing, Database / OLTP, Web2.0 Servers, High Performance Computing, Virtualization and Exchange;
- Intrepid – Online archiving, Web search, Media streaming, Indexing, Transaction processing, VM infrastructure, Email servers, Analytics;
- ZD-XL – this solution was designed specifically for SQL Server Environments – Caching, Acceleration & Optimization;
- VXL – like the ZD-XL this is a Caching, Acceleration & Optimization solution specifically for VMware environments.
B&C: The newer Enterprise products of OCZ are successfully used by a lot of important institutions (e.g. in Italy by the Corte Suprema di Cassazione). Can you explain us the main advantages of your solutions compared to those of your rivals ones? Can you point out your expectations about the Enterprise market? And, will you utilize capacitors for power hold-up (initially an Enterprise solution) in your next consumer products, too (like Crucial and Samsung)?
BT: The enterprise market continues to grow rapidly and we are well positions as outlined above in different market segments to continue to grow our market share.
We now have all four pillars which is important to be competitive and manufactured market leading products: a market leading in-house controller, application software, firmware and direct access to NAND.
A few of the main advantages we have is obviously the direct access to NAND as part of the Toshiba Group which gives us the ability to look at the NAND technology in detail and develop additional features, get better performance, reliability and endurance.
It also ensures availability over the lifespan of a product which is very important in the enterprise market.
B&C: About the Cloud Computing, recently we have interviewed Gianni Anguiletti, Country Manager Italia of Red Hat, and he said that OpenStack is growing very well. What do you think about OpenStack? We know that OCZ has an excellent GNU/Linux driver database for its own products. Will you work in very close contact with Red Hat and the other GNU/Linux companies to support the Cloud Computing and the virtualization technologies? What are your relationships to these companies?
BT: I think OpenStack is a fantastic project which continues to drive innovation and is good for the market as a whole. Cloud Computing and Virtualization are both a big focus for us as a company and we continue to work with industry partners to develop market leading products for these segments.
B&C: SLC, MLC, TLC, and so on. There are a lot of types of NAND Flash memories, and the most of consumer customers don't know the differences between these. Are the enterprise/business customers uninformed like to the consumer ones? Which are the main difficulties that you are running into in the enterprise sector?
BT: When you look at tier1 enterprise customers, they usually understand the technology in detail and know what they are looking for in terms of storage.
You can break it up in many different market segments and talk about specific challenges and knowledge levels overall we are seeing the awareness, need and demand for flash based storage grow at an immense rate in the enterprise space. When it comes to the SME market, I believe there is still a lot of education to take place in order to penetrate this on a wide scale.
B&C: When I was a young overclocker one of my forbidden dreams was a Dual Channel set of these memories: OCZ DDR PC4800 EL Platinum (Samsung TCCD). I was very sad when I found out about the decision of OCZ to abandon the RAM market, during 2011. At that time the profit margin was very low for this kind of product, but now the memory market seems to be very profitable. Do you think that OCZ can return in this market in the near future? Or, will OCZ be only a SSD Premium supplier?
BT: As you can notice from our new company name, OCZ “Storage Solutions” our focus is going to be on storage. Our goal is now to grow market share again both in the consumer and enterprise space.
The SSD market is one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry today. According to analysts the market size will be over $23 billion by 2017 so having that direct access to NAND will be a major competitive advantage.
B&C: Thanks Tobias, it has been a pleasure talking with you!
BT: The pleasure was all mine, thank you.