RamSan® Press Releases

CONTACT: 
Woody Hutsell
Texas Memory Systems 
1200 Westheimer Suite 1000 
Houston, TX 77042 
Ph: (713) 266-3200

Texas Memory Systems Announces the Tera-RamSan

Houston, Texas—February 26, 2003—Texas Memory Systems announces a ground-breaking SAN system for enterprise storage customers interested in the ultimate in performance for their mission critical data:  the Tera-RamSan, providing up to 1 Terabyte of non-volatile solid state disk for the enterprise that requires unlimited performance.

The Tera-RamSan is the ultimate storage device. With a storage unit based on SDRAM, it has an access time measured in microseconds instead of milliseconds as is usually found on rotational devices.  The Tera-RamSan utilizes 32 RamSan-220 (SSD storage) modules, known as the World Fastest Storage®. The Tera-RamSan provides an astonishing 2 million I/Os per second (IOPS), a 1024 gigabyte capacity, and 128 2-Gbit Fibre Channel links. It requires 2 racks and 5000 watts.

The Tera-RamSan represents our solution to realistic requests from a broad range of entities from the U.S. Military to Fortune 500 companies who have requested Terabyte solid state disks for applications such as database acceleration, high definition video access/editing, OLTP, data retrieval, ERP, and SAN storage. Lower SDRAM prices make the Tera-RamSan a realistic competitor to other Enterprise storage solutions with much smaller RAM caches. The Tera-RamSan offers industry leading price-per-IOPS.

The Tera-RamSan incorporates specially designed 2-Gbit Fibre Channel interfaces that include performance-enhancing hardware to reduce I/O latency to under 20 microseconds. With I/O requests being served so quickly, an order of magnitude more requests per second are executed by a single Tera-RamSan interface as compared to other Fibre Channel interfaces. By scaling RamSan devices to 32 units (4 Fibre Channel links per unit), the Tera-RamSan is the ultimate storage solution for high-performance applications in total IOPS and total bandwidth. Also, because the Tera-RamSan is SDRAM based, there is NO penalty for RANDOM accesses. Data requests need not be tuned for performance. User access time is not compromised, even if tens of thousands of users access the system simultaneously. Extreme performance is the key feature of the Tera-RamSan. 

“We see the Tera-RamSan filling a unique niche for companies that require high-performance and high capacities,” said Holly Frost, CEO of Texas Memory Systems.  Texas Memory Systems has always focused on providing the World’s Fastest Storage®. “The Tera-RamSan confirms our industry-leading performance and engineering capability,” continues Mr. Frost.

More details are available at www.superSSD.com.

Tera-RamSan highlight features:

• Up to 1 Terabyte of non-volatile SDRAM in two racks.
• Over 2 million random I/O requests per second.
• Over 12GB/second of random sustainable data throughput bandwidth.
• Up to 2,000 physical LUNs.
• Requires 5,000 watts of power.
• Up to 32 independent non-volatile solid state disks (SSD) modules. Each SSD module is a RamSan-220, including 32GB of SDRAM and four 2-Gbit Fibre Channel connections.
• Each SSD module includes extensive high availability features: redundant lithium ion batteries, failover redundant Fibre Channel ports, redundant hot swap power supplies, mirrored and hot swap SCSI disk drives and hot swap fans.
• Tera-RamSan management is performed over Ethernet. Ethernet links the SSD modules to an external IP connection. Through this link, the SSD modules can be individually monitored. Tera-RamSan at a Glance monitoring software presents a summary view of all installed SSD modules so that the system administrator can see system level status at a glance.

About Texas Memory Systems 

Since 1978, Texas Memory Systems has designed, manufactured, and marketed the fastest storage subsystems available. TMS provides solutions that offer the best value and highest performance available in the solid state disk and digital signal processing markets. More information is available at www.texmemsys.com or by calling 713-266-3200.

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