Storage Overview

PCI STORAGE

RamSan-20

FLASH STORAGE

RamSan-620

RamSan-500

RamSan-5000

RAM STORAGE

RamSan-440

RamSan-400

RamSan-300

Write Accelerator

RamSan-300 highlights:
  • The World's Fastest Storage®
  • Over 200,000 random I/Os per second
  • 1.5 GB/s random sustained external throughput
  • IBM Chipkill technology
  • Exclusive Active Backup® software
  • Full array of hardware redundancy to ensure availability.

To order, please contact Texas Memory Systems Sales.

OVERVIEW | PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS | TECHNICAL SPECS

Texas Memory Systems developed the RamSan-300 with the goal of providing an enterprise solid state disk with entry-level pricing. The RamSan-300 meets these objectives by inheriting most of its components from the RamSan-400 enterprise SSD, including the same memory boards, Fibre Channel controllers, batteries, fans, power supplies, and backup hard disk drives.

The RamSan-300 offers a lower cost alternative to our larger capacity and higher performing RamSan-400 and RamSan-440 models. Recent studies have shown that 95% of the world’s stored data is accessed infrequently, and 66% is accessed only once. This suggests that the performance of even large databases can be significantly improved by accelerating only a small fraction of the files. The RamSan-300 is well-suited to handle small databases, metadata storage, log and transaction files, and database indices. It offers a low cost, low risk solution to application performance challenges that plague large and small businesses alike. 

The RamSan-300 is one of the most advanced SSDs on the market today. Its fast DDR RAM storage is ideal for storing performance-demanding data and accelerating essential applications.

Performance
TMS' numerous customers have seen real-world performance increases from 2x to 25x simply by installing a single RamSan. It plugs into servers or fabrics through basic Fibre Channel or InfiniBand connections and appears simply as a very, very fast drive to the network, able to act as any disk or storage system might. The RamSan-300 can accelerate numerous applications across industries. It is best known for drastic performance gains in OLTP, batch processing, and other intensive operations.

Reliability
There is no tradeoff in reliability for all this performance. The RamSan-300 includes hot swappable redundancies wherever physical wear is a factor, such as power supplies and backup hard disks. It also includes two independent internal UPS systems to ensure that no power loss or power supply failure will stop the RamSan from performing its internal backup procedures. Redundant cooling fans and redundant failover data ports (optional) are also part of the sophisticated design.

Interoperability
The RamSan-300 is designed to look like a disk to the network. Therefore, it is highly interoperable and works in virtually any enterprise environment. It is installed in numerous environments, including Apple OS X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Hardware from Fibre Channel and InfiniBand vendors including Cisco, Emulex, Brocade, McData, Mellanox, QLogic, LSI Logic, and ATTO easily interoperates with the RamSan. 

Active Backup® and Chipkill Technology: The Newest Innovations in SSD
Exclusive to the RamSan is Active Backup® software. Other SSDs and cache system can only "destage" data from RAM to backup disks once power is already lost. This means that data is never backed up during normal operation and the time-to-complete-backup after power loss is unacceptably long. A RamSan-300 with Active Backup can continuously backup data on RAM to the internal backup hard disks without impacting performance. This means in an emergency situation, data is anywhere from 60-100% on the backup hard drives already.

RamSan-300 systems take reliability even farther by implementing IBM Chipkill technology. Standard error correcting code (ECC) implementations correct single-bit data errors in memory chips but cannot correct the multi-bit errors that can result in data integrity issues. Chipkill technology allows a memory system to correct a multi-bit failure up to and including a total chip failure. 

Soft Error Scrubbing
The RamSan-300 is the first solid state disk to include soft error scrubbing. All solid state disks can correct a single bit error before sending data to the server as a part of their ECC protection. The RamSan-300, however, goes a step further by scrubbing; re-writing the corrected data to memory and then verifying the re-write to determine if a memory chip has a failure (a hard error) or if radiation transients caused the single bit error (a soft error). Systems that do not scrub single bit memory errors will either a) report errors to a system log that will eventually encourage replacement of a memory board or b) hide these errors thus leaving a potentially unsafe memory board in the system. Research on this topic suggests that 90% of single bit errors are soft errors. In these cases, the RamSan-300 will correct the error through the scrubbing process and prevent unnecessary downtime to replace the memory board.

I/Os Per Second

200,000

 

Capacity

16-32 GB

 

Bandwidth

1.5 GB per second

 

Latency

Less than 15 microseconds

 

Fibre Channel Connection

  • 4-Gigabit Fibre Channel (2-Gigabit capable)
  • 2 ports standard; up to 4 ports available
  • Supports point-to-point, arbitrated loop, and switched fabric topologies
  • Interoperable with Fibre Channel Host Bus Adaptors, switches, and operating systems

 

InfiniBand Connection

  • 4x InfiniBand (10-Gigabit)
  • 1 port standard; up to 2 ports available
  • Supports SRP upper level protocol
  • Interoperable with InfiniBand Host Channel Adaptors, switches, and operating systems

 

Management

  • Browser-enabled system monitoring, management, and configuration
  • Telnet management capability
  • Front panel displays system status and provides basic management functionality

 

LUN Support

  • 1 to 1024 LUNs with variable capacity per LUN
  • Flexible assignment of LUNs to ports
  • Hardware LUN masking

 

Data Retention

  • Non-volatile solid state disk
  • Redundant internal batteries power the system for 25 minutes after power loss
  • Automatically backs up data to disk at 60 MB/sec

 

Reliability and Availability

  • Chipkill technology protects data against memory errors up to and including loss of an entire memory chip
  • Internal redundancies
       - Power supplies and fans
       - Backup battery power
       - Backup hard disk drives (mirrored)
  • Hot-swappable components
       - Two backup hard drives (front access)
       - Power supplies
  • Soft Error Scrubbing
       - When a single bit error occurs on a read, the RamSan will
       automatically re-write the data to memory thus scrubbing soft errors.
       Following the re-write the system re-reads to verify the data is
       corrected.

 

Backup Procedures
Supports two backup modes that are configurable per system or per LUN:

  • Data Sync mode - synchronizes data to redundant internal disk drives before shutdown or with power loss
  • Active Backup® mode (optional) - backs up data constantly to internal redundant disks without impacting system performance.

 

Size

5.25" (3U) X 16"

 

Power Consumption (peak)

250 Watts

 

Weight (maximum)

70 lbs