Santa to Replace RAID With Texas Memory SSD to Reduce Power Consumption

Texas Memory Systems and Santa, the world’s leading distributor of children’s toys, announced an initiative to replace all monolithic RAID storage at The North Pole with energy efficient and super fast solid state disks (SSD) by the end of 2008. This proactive move is expected to reduce the energy required to process the “Naughty or Nice” lists by up to 50%.

As the world population has increased beyond 6.6 billion, Santa has seen a corresponding increase in the demand for his services. With only 32 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, an estimated 154 million toy orders must be processed daily. This means database performance is mission-critical.

“Few people stop to consider just how daunting the logistics of our operation are,” said Ms. Elf, senior executive vice president of worldwide sales at Santa (Global) Enterprises. “Most orders come from letters. Each letter must be entered into the database, and then cross-referenced with naughty-or-nice lists. With an average of three toys for an estimated 1.65 billion children, the old hard disk-based RAID systems just couldn’t cope with the number of transactions.”

Santa chose the RamSan-500 cached flash solid state device to replace his hard disk drives. This new flash-based solid state device was recently announced by Texas Memory Systems, makers of the “World’s Fastest Storage.” The RamSan-500 is up to 16 times faster than hard disk-based storage systems and requires only 50% of the power, so it saves energy and runs cooler.

“The RamSan is fast, but it also runs cooler than hard disk drive systems,” said a storage analyst familiar with the deal. “Lower heat emission was an important factor in the decision to use the RamSan because heat from the racks’ hard drives, coupled with global warming, was starting to damage the foundations of Santa’s North Pole data center. It was getting wet in there.”

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