Penn State University Opts for Texas Memory eMLC SSD System

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. announced
that the Research Computing and
Cyber-infrastructure group (RCC) at Penn State University has implemented a
RamSan-810 SSD system to reduce its nightly backup times while improving IOPS
performance and minimizing related power, cooling and floor space costs.

The RCC group at Penn State provides systems and services that are
used in research, teaching and service missions by more than 3,000 faculty
members and students to perform computational research. The group was
overprovisioning capacity of 200 15K RPM hard disk drives in an attempt to
generate acceptable IOPS in order to complete backup operations during a brief
overnight window so as to not impact production processes. With backups taking
as long as six hours to complete and degrading other system operations, the team
at RCC determined that a SSD solution was needed to handle the
necessary IOPS load and replace the HDDs.

After evaluating SSD products from four vendors, the RCC team
decided to implement a pair of RamSan-810 1U solid state units in a HA mirrored
configuration that took advantage of the replication functionality of its IBM
General Parallel File System. After installing the RamSan-810 systems, the
RCC’s nightly backup times improved by 6x, dropping from six to just one hour.

"With some of the other
solutions we tested, we poked and pried at them for weeks to get the
performance where the vendors claimed it should be," said Michael
Fenn, systems administrator at Penn State. "With the RamSan, we literally just turned it on and that’s all the performance
tuning we did. TMS was the best solution largely because of its maturity and
performance. It seemed very stable and it just worked out of the box."

The RamSan-810 is a SSD storage system from TMS to use
Enterprise eMLC flash memory, a technology that features
high speed and reliability paired with the affordability of MLC. It is for read-intensive environments such as Penn State’s, whose
applications usage consists of an 85/15 read-write ratio, offering a better
value than the increased write performance – but higher cost – of a SLC system.

Additional cost savings that RamSan storage creates when replacing
traditional hard drive systems includes power consumption reduction by 90%,
lowered data center cooling costs and smaller floor space requirements.

"The computational needs
of educational organizations like Penn State can be taxing for all but the
best-performing storage systems out there," said Dan Scheel, president
of Texas Memory Systems. "By
developing a rackmount Flash storage system that combines speed, reliability
and affordability, the eMLC RamSan-810 is able to deliver outstanding
read-intensive IOPS to organizations that need to respond to the growing
storage and performance needs of their users and applications. RamSan-810 is a
greener, more-efficient alternative to traditional HDD systems and an
easier-to-use, real-world-proven option over other SSD products."