Texas Memory Brings Out Application Accelerator RamSan-820

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. unveiled its new RamSan-820 flash-based storage system.

It (24TB) offers the same high availability features as the RamSan-720 (12TB), but gives users an eMLC alternative for applications requiring lower cost or higher capacity. Both systems are designed from the ground up with a design to mitigate the effects of component failures and will continue to operate in the event of any single component failure. It is the company’s second eMLC product offering and is based upon the RamSan operating system.
 
Key elements in the RamSan-820 include very low latency and power. Competitors, who lack this combination, claim that they have more storage service features than TMS. However, if a user is waiting for a simulation to complete, the last thing on their mind is getting these slow storage accessories included. And, when compared to features and performance of any rotational or SSD-based solution, the RamSan-820 proves to an excellent integrated ROI solution.
 
"Many of our competitors claim they are software companies and that their products are Application Accelerators. While this may be fundamentally true, all TMS products are 2x faster than any other Application Accelerators shipping today," according to TMS CEO Holly Frost. "It comes down to very simple technical and business questions:  Why put key functions into slow software when you can speed up these functions in fast hardware? Would you want additional software functions in your system when you are really just trying to increase revenues/productivity/green efficiencies by maximising throughput?  The TMS design does not sacrifice performance for ease of development and prides itself on being the most innovative and respected SSD hardware company for over three decades."
 
The RamSan-OS has been in continuous development for over five years, initially shipping with TMS’ first flash-based product, the RamSan-500 in 2007. It is designed from the ground up to run on a cluster of CPU nodes and FPGAs distributed throughout the RamSan systems. While some in the industry typically implement complex algorithms and management routines in software on general purpose processors, thereby simplifying development, TMS implements its computationally intensive operations with software and hardware without resorting to power hungry circuits. To prove the low power of 450 watts, TMS includes a watt-meter with every RamSan system for comparison purposes. If another vendor’s SSD storage unit only runs on 220v, users will need a larger watt-meter.
 
"Many customers assume that all Flash appliances are created equal, however Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan-OS shows that this is not the case," said George Crump, Lead Analyst of Storage Switzerland. "Texas Memory Systems’ use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays to execute the most commonly run time-critical software functions while running higher level, more complex operations on the onboard CPUs inside the RamSan appliance provides a more consistent performance condition over software-only models that can cause some performance variability. Texas Memory Systems’ purpose-built RamSan-OS makes sure that all of the parts in its Flash storage system work as expected to ensure maximum data reliability is achieved."
 
The RamSan-OS is designed to maximise the performance and investment in a flash storage system. It controls everything from the lowest level flash management operations through the highest level system storage infrastructure management. The lowest levels of the operating system are implemented in FPGA hardware in order to maintain the highest performance, the lowest data latency, and the lowest power consumption. Higher-level complex operations, those that are less performance-critical, are implemented in software (CPUs). Even though the RamSan-OS is implemented in software and hardware, the use of completely reprogrammable devices ensures that the RamSan-OS is field-upgradable for application-specific performance tuning or for the addition of more features.
 
"Flash memory has gained a lot of acceptance in the data centre, but many don’t use it today for a very good reason – the technology is worrisome," said Jim Handy, SSD analyst at Objective Analysis. "TMS has done a good job of addressing these concerns with its carefully-managed eMLC flash in a high-availability configuration."
 
With these advancements to the HA RamSan products, users can have a 24TB storage capacity appliance, with very low latency, and low power in a single 1U appliance.
 
The RamSan-820 is for OLTP, SAP, data acquisition, simulations, on-line processing, real-time Processing, and other critical I/O computational processing.