Record of 5TB on SLC Flash Subsystem From Texas Memory

Texas Memory Systems announced the RamSan-620, a complete, high-performance, reliable Flash system that delivers up to five terabytes of solid state storage in a single 2U chassis. The RamSan-620 offers superior price/performance/capacity value to comparable hard disk drive and Flash-form factor modules. Applications such as on-line transaction processing, data warehousing, high-performance data acquisition, batch processing, and video editing will benefit from the RamSan-620.

Improvements in Flash technology and pricing are creating demand in IT departments for a variety of Flash storage solutions. The storage performance needs of increasingly demanding applications and growing numbers of concurrent users are not being met by mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) systems. Savvy CIOs are realizing that while hard disk appears cheap on a per-gigabyte basis, in performance-sensitive production environments it can be far more effective and economical to replace HDD with solid state drives (SSD). Competing Flash SSD offerings from traditional storage suppliers lack density, are massively power hungry due to oversized storage controllers and are built on architectures that slow down the underlying Flash media. The RamSan-620 shows the potential of Flash when it is unencumbered by archaic ideas of what a storage system should look like.

The RamSan-620 offers scalable performance and affordable capacity that is both space and power efficient. A single unit offers up to five terabytes of reliable Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash, making the RamSan-620 the highest capacity SLC Flash SSD on the market. This Flash system also leads the industry performance tables, with 250,000 sustained I/Os per second (IOPS) for random reads and random writes. Throughput is 3GB per second and latency comes in at an astounding 80 microseconds for writes, 60 times less than high-performance HDD. The RamSan-620 is a green IT choice, occupying only 2U of rack space and drawing just 325 Watts of power. In order to achieve similar performance, HDD solutions would require as many as 500 drives, occupy 36 disk enclosures requiring almost three racks, consume upwards of 7,000 Watts, and cost over half a million dollars by the time the enclosures and controllers were included.

“The IT community is looking for ways to increase storage efficiency while boosting productivity,” said Greg Schulz, founding analyst at StorageIO and author of The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC). “It is time to stop moving around I/O or other bottlenecks and start enabling storage efficiency via performance optimized storage that does more work, in a smaller footprint (power, cooling, floor-space, economic) while boosting productivity. Anyone can attach Flash SSD to a computer or storage system; however the real trick and business benefit is when a storage system or applications server can fully utilize the technology without introduction of, or moving I/O and performance bottlenecks elsewhere. The RamSan-620 is an example of a new breed of storage solutions that have been optimized to leverage the capabilities of Flash SSD while preserving application Quality of Service (QoS) and service level objectives.”

The RamSan-620 is a general purpose storage solution that can increase performance for applications and users in a shared network storage environment. Each unit can support 2 to 8 Fibre Channel or InfiniBand ports. Installation and management are simple, with embedded management capabilities and clear displays. One or more RamSan-620s can easily be integrated into a mixed storage infrastructure and monitored and managed through a common management framework.

“Flash is enabling us to deliver high-performance storage solutions to a much broader customer base,” said Woody Hutsell, President of Texas Memory Systems. “For over 30 years we have been at the forefront of storage performance and application acceleration for enterprises. With this 15th generation RamSan we are combining expertise and technology to solve challenging problems of performance and efficiency for CIOs in companies of all types and sizes. This really is a breakthrough of giant, green storage that is affordable for mainstream IT shops across industries.”

The RamSan-620 is available now from Texas Memory Systems and its partner network.