"Add this to a direct-attached storage system, and it's like putting it on steroids," TMS President Dan Scheel told eWEEK.
Not
too many IT companies have 17th-generation products, but Texas Memory Systems
is one that does.
The
venerable Houston-based company, which has been making solid-state memory for
32 years, came out May 17 with a new NAND flash-based PCIe (Peripheral Component
Interconnect Express) card called the "Gorilla"-a high-performance,
half-length data accelerator with a whopping 900GB of usable space.
"Add
this to a direct-attached storage system, and it's like putting it on
steroids," TMS President Dan Scheel told eWEEK.
The
Gorilla-the product name is actually RamSan-70-is the first release in TMS'
next-generation RamSan Series-7 product line. Scheel said it is capable of more
than 330,000 IOPS with bandwidth exceeding 2GB per second.
The
RamSan-70, aimed at the OEM storage
market, is designed to be in-server accelerator for storage use cases such as
onsite medical imaging, data warehousing, enterprise resource planning (ERP),
sophisticated data acquisition, scientific computing and Web content, Scheel
said.
For
those who crave technical details, the RamSan-70 is the first product powered
by TMS' new Series-7 Flash controller, which is based on advanced Xilinx
field-programmable gate arrays combined with an embedded PowerPC processor,
Scheel said.
Unlike
other PCIe cards, the proprietary hardware in the Series-7 Flash Controller
handles all NAND flash management internally, which frees up host resources for
workloads, Scheel said.
"IT
managers are always looking for ways to increase I/O performance, reduce
latency and improve overall system efficiency," said Jeff Janukowicz, research
manager for Solid State Storage Technology at IDC. "A PCIe Flash SSD, such
as Texas Memory Systems' RamSan-70, can solve many of these issues."
The
RamSan-70 is scheduled for availability in June.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
