New Texas Memory SSD Screams with Speed

SanDisk, Seagate Technology, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba and Fujitsu have been making most of the solid-state disk headlines lately. They now have some competition from an old, familiar face.
 
Texas Memory Systems, 30 years old this year, introduced a new SSD July 22 with what it claims is record performance and record capacity for a RAM-based system.

The RamSan-440 is the world's first nonvolatile RAM-based SSD to sustain up to 600,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) and deliver up to 512GB of storage capacity in a 4U rack-mount chassis, the Houston-based company claims.

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It's also the first SSD to use RAIDed NAND flash memory modules for data backup and the first system to incorporate Texas Memory Systems' own patented IO² (Instant-On Input-Output) "secret sauce" technology. The feature improves system availability by making user- or application-requested data instantly accessible after the system is powered on, the company said.

Solid-state flash drives use enterprise-class flash memory to store and retrieve data, enabling read/write response times that are about 30 times faster than the current highest-quality hard disk drives. Because they have no moving parts, SSDs require much less power to run, and breakdowns are rare.

RamSan solid-state disks are used in the financial, telecom, e-commerce and online gaming industries, as well as in government, military and research organizations for online transaction processing, data warehousing and batch processing, the company said.

The RamSan-440 uses DDR2 (double-data-rate) RAM to deliver 600,000 sustained random IOPS and 4G bps of sustained random read or write bandwidth, with latency of less than 15 microseconds. It is available in 256GB and 512GB configurations in a 4U chassis. The system can be SAN-attached or direct-attached through as many as eight 4G-bps Fibre Channel ports, the company said.

The RamSan-440 uses RAID protected flash memory modules to back up the RAM-based data and ensure nonvolatility for the system. In Active Backup mode, the RamSan-440 continuously backs up data to the internal redundant flash modules with little impact on system performance, the company claims.

The RamSan-440 is available now. More information is available here.