Today's Briefing
Texas Memory's RAMSAN-620 Flash SSD
The RAM-SAN 620 opens up a new category in the SSD market; Flash JBOD. While each individual card has its own RAID, most likely customers will create LUNS across the cards. Think of the cards as individual drives in a drive shelf. Although the reliability of the individual drives is far greater than the reliability of mechanical drives, in most cases you will want to add your own data protection scheme, either mirroring or RAID.
For host based systems you can simply create a mirror between the individual cards, for example group 3 cards in one mirror and 3 cards in the other. The remaining four could for example be assigned to another server and mirrored 2 by 2. The result is very simple, redundant data protection that offers stunning performance at an unprecedented price point.
For more traditional RAID you can add a RAID controller to the host itself or more likely this system is a natural for storage system OEM's that do most of the RAID intelligence in their system enclosure and the shelves are just JBOD. Those storage system manufacturers can simply add this device to their configurations and they can finally have a credible flash offering, one that is both reliable, takes advantage of their system's features and does so at an aggressive price point.
More broadly systems like this continue to hammer nails in mechanical drives coffin. The days of Fibre Channel are numbered, and today's briefing on the Texas Memory RAMSAN-620 is another step in that eventuality.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
With today's announcement by Texas Memory Systems of the RAM-SAN 620, one of the great complaints of flash based storage that mechanical drive manufacturers like to throw over the fence is lack of density. The RAMSAN-620 makes this claim mere myth by providing up to 5TB’s of storage in a 2U enclosure. Storage Switzerland was onsite (see picture) for a hands on look at this new product.
Available in 2TB or 5TB models it will attach to a host via Fibre Channel or in the near future Inifinband and will deliver sustained random read or write performance of about 250,000 IOPS at only 325 watts of power. This makes its one of the greenest 250,000 IOPS configurations available. The system leverages Texas Memory's RAMSAN-20 PCI-E SSD technology. The system holds up to 20 250GB Flash cards in one chassis.. This provides a shareable and big capacity version of the RAMSAN-20 for the enterprise environment.
