Texas Memory Granted a Patent for Instant-On Input-Output Technology

Texas Memory Systems has been granted a patent for its Instant-On Input-Output (IO²) technology, which enables instant access to data from a RAM-based Solid State Disk (SSD) after a unit is powered-on. Without this technology a half-terabyte of data could take up to two hours to be available from SSD memory after a power outage.

Super fast solid state disks, like Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan products, allow organizations to manage very high transaction volumes and larger numbers of users using fewer servers, thus increasing performance while lowering cost and administration efforts. They are used in the financial, telecom, e-commerce, and online-gaming industries, as well as government, military, and research organizations, for online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, and batch processing. The growing size of mission-critical databases and the falling cost of solid state disks have increased demand for high-capacity SSDs making IO² a must-have.

"Solid state disks are becoming more important in the data center as users demand faster application performance," said Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "As these systems achieve faster time to performance as well as greater capacity, the ROI calculation begins to shift much more favorably in favor of using SSDs with critical applications. CIOs need to consider the capabilities made available by Texas Memory Systems’ new IO² technology."

IO² technology increases application availability by making mission critical data instantly available to an application after a SSD is powered up. A traditional SSD must wait on data to be entirely loaded from internal backup hard disk drives to the RAM storage area before the data is accessible. For smaller SSDs, the loss in availability is small. Without IO², large capacity SSDs are impractical as availability could be lost for up to two hours just to load data from disk to memory. With IO², the duration of data restoration does not affect system availability ensuring the highest levels of productivity for users and profitability for the enterprise.

"Although downtime for a RamSan SSD in a production environment is rare, it is a possibility, for example in the case of a planned shutdown," said Woody Hutsell, Executive Vice President at Texas Memory Systems. "Because Texas Memory Systems has been the SSD supplier of choice for mission-critical systems for nearly 30 years, we developed the IO² technology to address any potential loss of productivity caused by delayed data access during power up."

Texas Memory Systems’ Instant-On Input-Output (IO²) technology, patent number 7,216,222 is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IO² will be available as a licensable feature on upcoming RamSan SSDs.