The RamSan-5000 is a scalable enterprise data storage solution based on the award-winning RamSan-500 Cached Flash Solid State Disk (SSD). The RamSan-5000 is the fastest Flash memory-based system in the world to go beyond the lab and into the marketplace. The base-line configuration delivers one million Input/Output operations Per Second (IOPS) and can scale to several million IOPS using Texas Memory Systems’ new Turbo feature.
The RamSan-5000 solution is an array of ten (10) individual RamSan-500 Cached Flash units. The systems are deployed with Texas Memory Systems TeraWatch firmware which supports monitoring and configuration of the units from a single graphical user interface.
Solid state disk systems are used by large enterprise, government, military, and research organizations to accelerate their most critical applications. Faster systems can support more transactions and users with fewer servers and licenses. As such they are more cost effective than adding large hard-disk based systems, server-based RAM, or expensive application tuning. Flash-based SSD systems like the RamSan-5000 offer dramatically lower costs and power consumption than previously available.
Customers with high performance storage needs expect to pay high prices for effective storage solutions, but the RamSan-5000 changes the rules. When modest performance requirements are added to the cost of raw capacity, RamSan-5000 solutions become cost competitive with traditional high performance hard disk drive (HDD) storage arrays. As the performance requirements escalate, so do the cost advantages of the RamSan-5000. Even at only moderately high performance requirements, solution costs drop to a fraction of the initial purchase price of equivalent HDD storage systems, with on-going power, space, and administration savings as added benefits.
Texas Memory Systems’ Turbo feature allows users to lock a logical unit (LUN) of storage in the large RAM cache of the predominantly Flash-based RamSan-500 units that make up the RamSan-5000 solid state system. Turbo transitions the RamSan system into a self-contained tiered storage solution with frequently-accessed files placed in persistent RAM storage while the remaining files are stored in Flash. A single RamSan-500 with the Turbo feature can provide over 300,000 random IOPS based on a mixture of accesses to the locked LUN and Flash memory. Therefore, a RamSan-5000 comprised of 10 Turbo-enabled RamSan-500s offers several million random IOPS.
The RamSan-5000 addresses the needs of commercial, private, and governmental enterprises relying on mission critical applications with performance and highly scalable data storage requirements. It provides the best price per performance availible on the market today.
The RamSan-5000 is available with 20TB of RAID-protected Flash, up to 640GB of RAM cache, and up to 80 4Gbit Fibre Channel ports (or 40 4x InfiniBand ports). It can deliver over 1,000,000 random read IOPS and up to 20GB/second of read or write bandwidth. Texas Memory Systems RamSan-5000 systems serve a range of enterprise requirements, including storage for large OLTP systems or data warehouses, video on demand, rendering, geospatial analysis, seismic processing, and data acquisition. The unique combination of cache to accelerate writes and Flash to accelerate reads results in a system truly balanced for enterprise applications. The 20TB RamSan-5000 is a proven solution and has already been installed at a customer site.
When performance is a factor, the RamSan-5000 offers power and density advantages over HDD-based storage media. The RamSan-5000 uses only 3,000 watts to deliver 1,000,000 IOPS. Deploying a disk based system with similar performance would require 5,000 HDDs and consume over 90,000 watts. The RamSan-5000 uses only 40U of rack space; a similarly performing HDD RAID system would require at least five times this rack space.
The Turbo feature allows storage administrators to boost performance of the RamSan-5000 even further by dedicating the fastest part of the RamSan to the write-intensive components of their applications. This change delivers microsecond response times. The Turbo feature also prolongs the life of the Flash memory used in the RamSan-5000. Turbo works by allowing administrators to lock a LUN entirely in the RamSan-5000 high speed RAM cache, thus dedicating a portion of the cache to a specific dataset such as write-intensive metadata, redo logs, temporary space, or tablespaces. The RamSan-5000’s high availability features, such as redundant battery and RAID-protected Flash ensure that the data in the locked LUN is persistent, even in the event of an external power loss.
The RamSan-5000 is monitored by TeraWatch which allows for easy management of multiple RamSans from a single management console. TeraWatch monitoring software presents a summary view of all installed RamSan modules and provides a single point to monitor the performance and any potential problems with the RamSan modules. Terawatch is a part of the same management software program used to manage the RamSans individually.
The RamSan-500 is the basic unit from which the RamSan-5000 is configured. The RamSan-500 is the most important advance in solid state 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.
![Texas Memory RamSan-6300 Enterprise SSD Storage [SLC RAID Array]](images/products/ramsan_6300.gif "Texas Memory RamSan-6300 Enterprise SSD Storage [SLC RAID Array]")
