Frequently Asked Questions

We have engineered a lot of redundancy into our RamSan^® systems. The systems have hot swap power supplies, hot swap and RAID protected backup hard disk drives and Flash modules, capacitors, redundant batteries, redundant fans, ECC and Chipkill protected memory (essentially RAIDed memory), support for redundant controllers (with multipathing software), and a management controller that operates purely outside of the data path so that a failure does not stop data transfer. Even with all of these redundant mechanisms in place, your system is susceptible to data loss in the event of a catastrophic failure. If you would like more information about high availability configurations, please contact info@ramsan.com.

Most disk arrays have not certified Flash drives for their enclosures, so for most people the answer is no. As manufactures begin to certify Flash drives, they will need to re-architect their systems to leverage the performance of Flash storage. The current architecture is not well designed for high bandwidth or high IOPS from individual disks, and a significant latency penalty (~1 ms) is imposed by the front-end to cache. This latency is significant because the controllers were designed with disks in mind. With disks as the backend storage, imposing a 1 ms overhead on a 5-20 ms disk response time was trivial; however, this overhead dwarfs Flash response time. Additionally, buyers should be aware that there is a wide range between the performance and reliability of different Flash hard disk drives. Our Flash-based RamSan^® products are architected from the ground up with Flash in mind and have dramatically lower latency than other systems.

If a host bus adapter company (ATTO, Cambex, Emulex, LSI Logic, QLogic), host channel adapter company (Mellanox, QLogic), or server manufacturer makes an HBA or HCA to support open systems, then odds are we will work with it. If a switch company (Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, QLogic) makes a switch for open systems environments, then odds are that we will work with that switch also. Many of these companies are our customers or partners. They use our solid state disk to test performance of their own products.

The RamSan^® is not limited to any specific applications. Historically the RamSan^® has been implemented to increase performance and system utilization in areas such as online transaction processing, data warehousing, file system metadata acceleration, database systems, non-linear video editing, software configuration and versioning tools acceleration and testing/benchmarking. Please see Solid State Disk Solutions for more ideas.

The peripheral RamSan^® devices support SNMP monitoring programs and provide a MIB for download. All items monitored in the RamSan^® are provided over SNMP.

Almost certainly, unless you live in a country that is prohibited from buying technology products from U.S. companies. Even more importantly, because of our network of worldwide relationships, solid state disks can be supported in most global locations. Please check with TMS for availability.

Texas Memory Systems and our resellers have a limited pool of evaluation units. Contact your TMS Sales Representative for details.

We have developed a number of tools and methodologies to assist our customers and help determine if solid state disk is a good investment for your application. We will help you analyze operating system, database, and application performance data to look for I/O bottlenecks. Please contact us at (713) 266-3200 for more details.

Yes. Please read some of our Solid State Disk Success Stories first. These customers have already invested a lot of their time in order to provide you with examples of how solid state disks benefit application performance. If you would like additional references, please contact us directly.

Once you have connected the RamSan^® to your server, the LUNs presented by the RamSan^® can be formatted (or not) with any file system. In fact, since the RamSan^® can present up to 1024 LUNs, each of those LUNs could be formatted with a different file system. The RamSan^® is frequently used with SAN shared file systems such as Sun's QFS, Quantum’s StorNext, and Polyserve's Matrix Server.

Active Spare^® is a feature available for our all-Flash rackmount systems. The most probable element of failure in Flash-based RamSans is a Flash chip, which is protected against failure by the RAID-5 layout within each Flash card. In the event of a Flash chip failure, Active Spare migrates the data from the Flash module with a degraded RAID onto the designated spare to return to full RAID protection. A maintenance window can be scheduled to replace the degraded module; the newly installed module becomes the new Active Spare. Failures of components other than Flash chips on a board (RAID controller, etc.) are not recoverable with Active Spare.

The RamSan-810 uses enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) NAND Flash.

The RamSan-710, RamSan-640, RamSan-630, RamSan-70, and RamSan-20 systems use single level cell (SLC) NAND Flash memory.

RamSan-440 and RamSan-300 systems use dynamic random access memory (DRAM).

A PCIe Flash card is a solid state storage device (SSD) that plugs directly into the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect bus) express slots of an individual server. Placing fast, persistent storage near server processors can improve application performance.

The RamSan-70 and RamSan-20 bring solid state storage as close as possible to server CPUs, avoiding the latency added by disk and RAID controllers, network protocols, switches, and the additional hardware and software involved in both NAS and SAN configurations. The RamSan-70 and RamSan-20 incorporate on-board controllers, small amounts of RAM, ECC and RAID data protection (patented Variable Stripe RAID™ for the RamSan-70), and extra Flash capacity so the cards have very little impact on host resources and data is not lost during server crashes or power loss, while providing hundreds of times faster storage than hard disk drives.

For a price quote, please call us at 713-266-3200 and ask for RamSan^® sales, or complete the Request for Product Information and Prices form. We would like to discuss your application with you and help size your solid state disk requirement. Many customers don't need as much solid state storage as they think, leading to significant cost savings. According to the Storage Performance Council, the RamSan^® offers the best price to performance ratio of any tested storage device.

RamSan SSDs really surpass other SSD solutions (and blow away traditional hard drives) when it comes to enterprise applications that generate lots of random reads and writes, like Oracle and SQL Server databases. While an SSD is a great upgrade for your PC, most home users don't generate enough random activity to truly take advantage of the speed and power of a RamSan.

That said, if you still want to install an enterprise-grade RamSan in your home PC, feel free to take out a home equity loan and give us a call!

Yes. Texas Memory Systems has a line of PCIe in-server SSDs, like the RamSan-70, that have the high IOPS and low latency your applications need.

If a PCIe solution does not fit your needs, the time has come for you to leave the SCSI direct attached storage model. If you need the speed of solid state disk, you also need the speed of 8 Gbit Fibre Channel or QDR InfiniBand. Both are as simple to install and connect as SCSI, but offer better performance, reliability, and networkability.

Texas Memory Systems customers regularly see profound performance improvements in their applications using RamSan products—as high as 2,500%!

To provide an independent assessment of the high performance that RamSan SSDs are capable of, TMS joined the Storage Performance Council, which publishes audited benchmark results. RamSan SSDs achieved the following published, audited, and certified test results:

• RamSan-630 (audit identifier A00105, published 7/9/11): A record 400,503.26 SPC-1 IOPS^® with 4.88 milliseconds latency. As a unified solution with other hardware and support options, it had a price/performance of $1.05 per SPC-1 IOPS^®.
• RamSan-620 (audit identifier A00085, published 12/26/09): 254,994.21 SPC-1 IOPS^® with .62 milliseconds latency. As a unified solution, it had a price/performance of $1.13 per SPC-1 IOPS^®.
• RamSan-400 (audit identifier A00063, published 3/28/08): 291,202.58 SPC-1 IOPS^® with .86 milliseconds latency. As a unified solution, it had a record price/performance of $0.67 per SPC-1 IOPS^®.

But what does this mean? The SPC-1 benchmark is created to simulate intensive OLTP (online transaction processing) environments and the I/O intensive, random-style behavior typical in such environments. Compared to all other audited results, these RamSan systems stand alone as stellar combinations of performance and value.

The SPC results show that TMS' rackmount Flash and RAM solutions are fast, but what about PCIe RamSan SSDs? On 9/21/11, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released the results of their independent test of the RamSan-70 and RamSan-20. Not only did the RamSan-70 outperform all competing cards, but the CSCS also found that RamSan SSDs deliver their advertised performance while competitors do not.

From the RamSan CLI, issue this command:

admin #: system report 

(Be sure to log your console session if you would like to save the system report.)

From the RamSan GUI:

Login to the RamSan GUI
Select the Logs -> System Report button
Save to a file

Texas Memory Systems has tested and works with most multipathing software. TMS has developed an MPIO module for Windows 2003 environments. For Sun environments, we support MPxIO and Symantec's DMP. Where Symantec offers DMP, we support it. In IBM AIX environments, the RamSan^® works with RDAC, Cambex's multipathing software, and AIX's MPIO. In Linux environments, the system will work with built-in multipathing tools. Where QLogic offers their built-in active:passive multipathing tools, we work with them. The RamSan^® does not work with EMC's PowerPath on any operating system other than Windows. On Windows our MPIO module is compatible with EMC's PowerPath version 4.6 and higher.

The RamSan^® has been tested and works well in most server virtualization (VMWare, Polyserve) and server clustering (Windows, Sun, IBM, OpenVMS, Oracle, etc) environments. The RamSan^® supports simple and persistent reservations. It is a SCSI-III compatible device.