At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on Monday, OCZ Storage Solutions unveiled the next-generation SQL Server acceleration solution, and also announced its availability.OCZ is an early SSD (solid-state drive) vendor which Toshiba acquired out of bankruptcy in late 2013.

According to the OCZ announcement, the updatedSQL accelerator - dubbed the ZD-XL SQL Accelerator 1.5 - is available now, with a price-tag of US$2,950 for the 800GB version.Other than the 800GB version, the new accelerator will also be available in configurations with 1.6TB or 3.2TB of flash.

OCZ said that the ZD-XL SQL Accelerator 1.5is based on the company's flash hardware and its application-tuned software.

As per the details shared by OCZ, the ZD-XL SQL Accelerator 1.5supports Microsoft SQL Server 2014, 2012 and 2008 R2 versions, expanding on the key flash-based storage features which bring about an improvement in I/O access performance.

The new accelerator can speed up only the database files which need it, work with multiple virtual machines running SQL Server workloads simultaneously, as well as link databases with flash located across a network.

About the new accelerator, OCZ's SVP of Product Management,Daryl Lang, said: "Our next generation SQL accelerator extends the SQL Server 2014 flash storage feature-set and uniquely exposes our PCIe-based on-host flash resources as local flash volumes, a flash cache for HDD volumes, or any combination of both, efficiently distributing random workloads in parallel between all of its available flash."