Solid State Disk Overview
Texas Memory Systems RamSan® solid-state disks are The World's Fastest Storage®, outperforming even the fastest conventional disk drives for enterprise applications. RamSan® solid-state disks offer an unbeatable combination of audited performance and value.
Conventional wisdom says that computer systems and networks are becoming faster and faster by orders of magnitude as time goes on. In terms of processor clock rates, this is largely true. Storage devices, however, are relatively stagnant. Storage speed—measured by seek time, operations per second, total bandwidth, and other rubrics—has increased at a snail's pace compared to other aspects of computing.
This difference has created a substantial performance gap over the years, and more often than not computer systems experience some kind of substantial performance bottleneck due to storage devices. In high-demand networks, the performance gap is painfully obvious. All the fast servers in the world are wasted if storage can't carry out its orders fast enough. In situations where “hot files” and databases are constantly read from or written to by multiple sources across a network, this bottleneck creates a crisis for the entire network infrastructure.
Storage speeds lag behind processor speeds because most storage is constrained by physical considerations. A magnetic, spinning disk must be written to or read from by a physical arm traveling across the disk. Precious milliseconds go by as one part starts to spin up, then another moves to the appropriate area. According to StorageReview.com, the fastest hard disk drives have access times equal to 5 milliseconds (peak performance). Multiply this by the billions of operations demanded by users daily, and a considerable lag results.
Hard Disk Drive: Moving Parts and Slow Storage Speeds
Enter solid state disks. Solid state disks solve the problem of physical constraints by replacing hard disk drives with high speed circuitry. Instead of a rotating disk, a solid state disk uses memory chips (typically DDR RAM or Flash memory) to read and write data. Solid state disks allow storage to catch up with the rest of the computing world. Texas Memory Systems RamSan® RAM-based solid state disks have 15-microsecond access times (250 times faster than hard disk drives) and our RamSan® Flash-based solid state disks have 80-200 microsecond access times. The result is full utilization of existing processors. Instead of allowing expensive servers to constantly sit and wait for hard disk drives, your servers are busy increasing performance and operations per second. The bottom line is directly improved when servers do more transactions every day.
The immediate concern voiced about RAM solid state disks regards data persistence and volatility. Unlike magnetic disk drives, RAM-based disks require power to maintain their data. The solution to this is surprisingly simple: solid state disks include backup batteries and backup Flash or hard disk drives so that any data written to the DDR RAM can be mirrored or backed up. Our Flash solid state disks use non-volatile Flash memory as the primary storage media. The Flash solid state disks use DDR memory as capacitor- or battery-backed cache, which flushes any unwritten data to Flash memory in the case of an external power failure. Consequently, Texas Memory Systems RamSan® solid state disks, whether RAM- or Flash-based, offer complete data persistence.
Texas Memory Systems RamSan® solid state disks are designed to perfectly fulfill ever-increasing needs for The World's Fastest Storage®. RamSan® solid state disks not only outperform the fastest conventional drives hundreds of times over, but are many times faster than the closest competitor. Each RamSan® model outperforms all other brands of solid state disks while remaining simple in design, fully integrable with existing storage area networks, affordable, and scalable.
