RamSan® Press Releases

Texas Memory Systems RamSan completes testing in PROBE SuperComputing Center Testbed

Houston, TX - September 4, 2001 - Texas Memory Systems announced today that its RamSan solid state disk has completed extensive testing by two of the major Department of Energy supercomputing centers. The tests were conducted using the Probe testbeds at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) in Oakland, California. Probe is a research and development project undertaken jointly by the ORNL Computer Science and Mathematics Division and the NERSC facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The collaborative effort of the two National Laboratories provides a wide-area distributed storage testbed for High Performance Storage research, with an emphasis on the DOE/IBM-developed High Performance Storage System (HPSS).

Mike Gleicher, a consultant to NERSC and Oak Ridge National Laboratory orchestrated the testing at both the NERSC and Oak Ridge facilities. The Probe test environment included disk and server equipment from Sun, IBM, STK and SGI, Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters from Emulex (LP7000/LP8000), Brocade switches, and a team of testers at the two laboratories. The tests were designed to observe both raw device bandwidth and I/O performance of the RamSan, and performance as an HPSS mover-controlled device, as compared to other high-end storage options available for use at NERSC and Oak Ridge. Intensive tests were conducted over a 60-day period this Spring.

Regarding test results, Mike said, "the RamSan easily handled everything we tried with it. When bottlenecks were observed, they were always in the host devices". While bandwidth test results were impressive, the most impressive aspect about the RamSan was its I/O performance. In tests with an accounting database and a single Fibre Channel interface, the RamSan completed operations in half the time as a fast RAID. In actual time, the RamSan cut 2 hours off of a complex accounting test run at the Probe facility that normally takes 4 hours to complete. The RamSan nearly eliminated processor I/O wait time, and dramatically improved CPU efficiency. As the number of concurrent processes increased, the RamSan I/Os per second scaled up to nearly 4000 per second, while the RAID system I/Os per second stayed constant at around 250. Mike commented that "the RamSan is an excellent device to use for database applications".

As a part of the test, the RamSan was tested against multiple operating systems and host servers. The testing team was impressed with the ease of installation and commented that "the RamSan's stability was excellent, we had 0 problems with Fibre Channel performance or interoperability." Mike Gleicher presented the results from the Probe testing to the HPSS user group in June of this year.

About Texas Memory Systems
Texas Memory Systems, Inc. manufactures the RamSan family of solid state disks for storage networks. The RamSan represents TMS's sixth generation solid state disk. The same technology, previously only available to the military and intelligence community, is now available in the commercial market. The RamSan excels in high I/O and high bandwidth environments where traditional RAID systems fail to meet the needs of performance hungry applications. 

Texas Memory Systems is a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), DAFS Collaborative and is partnered with HP, Oracle, and Sun in order to deliver the World's Fastest Storage to the enterprise.

For more information, visit www.superSSD.com or call Woody Hutsell, Marketing Director, at 713-266-3200.

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