Texas Memory RamSan-500 Enterprise Cached Flash RAID Storage

The RamSan-500, TMS' twelfth generation solid state disk, is the most important advance in solid state disk storage in the last twenty years. The system is designed for high IO data warehousing, high bandwidth data acquisition, and rich media environments. The RamSan-500 is a hybrid of DDR RAM and Flash Memory (NAND-SLC). The judicious use of DDR RAM cache and advanced Flash Memory architecture extends the usability of this hybrid device into applications with large block sequential or random writes, small block synchronous sequential writes and any read-intensive application.

The DDR RAM cache (16-64GB) provides sub-20 microsecond cache hit times and shelters the flash memory from small random data accesses. The data in DDR RAM is protected with ECC and Chipkill. The DDR RAM cache is battery-backed up with redundant batteries.

The Flash Memory (1-2TB usable capacity) is arrayed in nine RAID-3 protected hot swappable modules. The reliability of each module is further enhanced with ECC memory layouts, wear-leveling, and bad-block retirement. The RamSan-500 uses NAND-SLC flash memory, the highest quality of flash memory available on the market. The RamSan-500 is designed from the ground-up to protect data from the problems inherent to traditional flash storage.

Performance

The RamSan-500 is the perfect combination of performance, price and capacity. With up to two terabytes of capacity, the system provides ample space for storing entire databases or frequently accessed files. Through its 4Gbit Fibre Channel or 4x InfiniBand ports the system is capable of over 100,000 random IOPS or 2 GB/second of sustained bandwidth (even with cache misses).

The RamSan-500 appears simply as a very, very fast disk to the network, able to act as any disk or storage system might. The RamSan-500 can accelerate numerous applications across industries. It is best known for drastic performance gains in read intensive environments such as read-intensive OLTP environments, data warehousing, video on demand and rendering and yet provides strong write performance.

Customers looking for high speed small block random write performance are encouraged to consider the RamSan-440.

Reliability

There is no tradeoff in reliability for this performance. The RamSan-500 includes hot swappable components or redundancies wherever physical wear is a factor, such as power supplies and flash memory. It also includes two independent internal UPS systems to ensure that no power loss or power supply failure will stop the RamSan from flushing data from the DDR RAM to the Flash RAID. Redundant cooling fans and redundant failover data ports (optional) are also part of the sophisticated design.

Interoperability

The RamSan-500 is designed to look like a disk to the network or operating system. Therefore, it is highly interoperable and works in virtually any enterprise environment. It can be installed in numerous environments, including Apple OS X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and Windows. Hardware from Fibre Channel and InfiniBand vendors including Cisco, Emulex, Brocade, McData, Mellanox, QLogic, and LSI Logic easily interoperates with the RamSan.