“Companies and individual users alike are trying to get the biggest bang for the buck—maximizing the speed and storage capacity of their machines at the lowest possible cost.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

____________________________________________________________

This Interview was made possible by our friends at

Domain name registration, premium domain auctions, and domain monetization services

____________________________________________________________
Ryan Petersen is the 35-year-old founder and CEO of OCZ, which was started in 2002 with two partners and $80,000 of his own money. Aside from being the CEO, Ryan is also the inventor or co-inventor of many of the proprietary products that OCZ offers. Prior to OCZ, Ryan was engaged in other entrepreneurial activities. He is one of the pioneering members of the Semiconductor Enhancement field and an active member of the engineering community.

OCZ Technology pulls it’s name from the term “overclockers,” slang for computer gaming enthusiasts who tune their machines to operate faster than originally specified by manufacturers. The company emerged from a garage and had $2 million in revenue in its first year, $8 million the next, and $36 million the year after that. It now earns $150 million in annual revenue and employs about 325 people, including 100 in San Jose. Staff is located around the world including San Diego, Toronto, Taipei and the Netherlands.

MO:
Today, OCZ is a leader in the design and manufacturing of Solid State Drives (SSDs) for consumers and businesses alike. Tell us about the technology behind SSDs and why that is an improvement over typical hard drives as we know them.

Ryan:
A Solid State Drive is a type of flash drive that can now completely replace traditional rotational-based drives in everything from Mobile PCs to servers. This is due to the lightning-fast processing capability and ample storage capacity of SSDs. A side-by-side comparison of the older and newer technologies reveals that SSDs are more durable and reliable than hard drives, they offer far superior performance, they consume much less energy, and they also run cooler while being lighter and quieter. Also in contrast to hard drives, the only things moving inside an SSD are electrons, which is another reason why they are ideal for on-the-go and ruggedized computing.

MO:
OCZ has won industry praise for high-performance memory and SSD business. What is the importance of these advancements to business and to individuals?

Ryan:
Companies and individual users alike are trying to get the biggest bang for the buck—maximizing the speed and storage capacity of their machines at the lowest possible cost. For example, the SSDs we are developing at OCZ make these savings possible on a scale that just wasn’t possible before.

Consumers enjoy overall snappier system performance with SSDs and unlike many computer components this is one product that you can immediately “feel” when gaming, audio or video editing or when simply booting up their computer. Enterprise customers realize better total Cost of Ownership (TCO), for example even though the cost per GB is higher for SSD over HDD a server client can achieve the same IOPS with a single drive versus a complete room of hard drives. This significantly reduces costs associated with power consumption and cooling.

In June we released the RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD, which operates at up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), nearly twice the speed of other consumer SSDs. It’s the world’s fastest consumer PCI-E SSD, and costs as little as $3 per gigabyte and unlike the competition is bootable so it can replace HDDs completely as your primary storage device.

MO:
What is your vision of the future of data storage and what will be needed to support it? Is cloud storage part of our future?

Ryan:
We’ve entered the era of the cloud, a way of computing via the Internet that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC. Whereas traditional IT services involve large data centers and server farms requiring substantial energy to power and cool the servers, cloud computing has a much smaller carbon footprint since it utilizes computer power more efficiently. But to accomplish this, cloud computing can’t depend on traditional hard drives—their access speed and power consumption hasn’t changed for over a decade. SSDs, however, allow users to access data electronically rather than mechanically, considerably reducing the time required and eliminating the need for large, costly storage area networks. Without massive server arrays, there are colossal power savings. Also, relying on SSDs to power the tasks of cloud computing requires a smaller facility to house the identical operation.

MO:
Your company was inspired in part by the notion of “overclocking”. In fact, OCZ is an abbreviated form of “overclockers”. Can you explain this philosophy?

Ryan:
Overclocking is the process of running a computer component at a higher clock rate—i.e., more clock cycles per second—than it was designed for by its manufacturer. Overclocking is usually practiced by enthusiasts seeking to increase the performance of their computers. When I got started, I spent a lot of time in the lab overclocking and designing products. As a company, OCZ has of course grown a great deal since those early days, but our core values and dedication to enthusiasts has never changed. In the future you can expect to see more exciting products and solutions that allow users to maximize their system performance. We will continue to focus on the successful delivery of specialty products that add real value to our customers’ total computing experience.

MO:
Outside of your role as founder and CEO of OCZ we understand you also have interests in music. Care to elaborate?

Ryan:
Whenever I have a spare moment from the business side of the operation I actually like to spend as much time as possible alongside our product management and engineering teams working on designing and refining new SSD solutions. For those few moments that I am not “working” I do enjoy playing the guitar and recording music. I have always had a passion for music and like business what draws me to it is the ability to create something truly unique.

MO:
As you look back to 2002, you had two partners (There was actually only one other partner, not two) and $80,000 to launch the company. What risks were involved in the launch? What obstacles presented themselves? How did you get past those obstacles?

Ryan:
Whenever a new business is undertaken there is always risk that the business will not survive the first few years. The lack of resources is always something that puts a strain on companies. In the early days we had to do a lot with very little and each and every person working for the company contributed in areas well beyond their original roles. I remember the many days when I was soldering devices or machining heat sinks myself. There was always so much to do and so little time in which to get it done, but we overcame these original obstacles by staying true to our vision, to give consumers what they really want. Our passion for breaking benchmarks and setting new performance records with computing components drove innovation and each and every person involved in the startup actively contributed to the company’s rapid growth. It was about more than just designing, manufacturing and selling products that we personally would buy ourselves, it was about winning.