The RAMSAN Series, Ultimate SSD for I/O Applications
08.10.07 - 03:25pm
Got a huge SQL database and tired of your hard drive array bogging you down with “slow” I/O operations? Tired of having a mountain of cash and want to turn it into a small humming steel box? Just like owning the fastest hardware available? Well look no further as I believe I have found one of the wonders of the computing world, Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan series of SSD drives. If I were operating something that required massive amounts of bandwidth, miniscule latency issues, and money wasn’t an issue then Texas Memory Systems would have my cash as fast as I could swipe the card. Just looking at the spec sheets for their various units makes me smile, hope you get the same feeling.
Tera-RamSan
The Tera-RamSan features up to a Terabyte of DDR in a 24U chassis, 32 million random I/O operations a second, 24GB/s of bandwidth through 64 4-Gbit Fibre connections. This thing is an absolute beast sitting inside a nice 24U chassis, from what I can tell this sort of thing would be used for multiple enormous SQL/XML databases, most likely for international corporations and such. Just the thought of 1 Terabyte of DDR sitting there makes my puny 4 gigs look.. tiny. Did I mention this thing sucks down a healthy 2500 watts?
RamSan-400
The Tera-RamSan is actually composed of four of the lower RamSan-400 with each one linked together to work as a singular being. Each RamSam-400 features 32 to 128 Gigabytes of DDR, 3 GB/s of bandwidth through 8 4-GBit Fibre connections, 400,000 random I/O operations a second, and sub-15ms latencies. With a more manageable 350 watts of power consumption and a 3U form factor I could easily seeing this ending up in a few high-end servers and such.
From what I hear an upgraded version, the RamSan-500 is now available with 64GB of DDR2 and 2048GB of FLASH memory, couldn’t find any solid specs on it though but I imagine it too is a beast. Now if you ever happen to come across one of these devices and want to give it a loving home I’ve got plans for a rack out in my garage with 3U reserved just for a RamSan. I just find these things to be amazing, I’m sure I could sit in front of one for a few minutes and just look at all the blinking lights.
I would love to be using one of these for my MySQL databases… Let me know if you ever get your hands on an extra one and don’t need it ;-)
Hah! Give a reader a super-highspeed database server or have an incredibly quick iTunes server hmmmm heh. Maybe I could loan out a few gigs =D