Features - Storage Innovations:

TEXAS MEMORY SYSTEMS LAUNCHES FASTEST RAID CACHE EVER

Texas Memory Systems Inc has released the RamSan-330 external storage cache. The RamSan-330 turbo charges storage by caching the most popular data and distributing it at maximum rates of 3 gigabytes per second bandwidth and 250,000 I/Os a second. While 16 gigabytes of RAID cache was once an expensive luxury to data centers, the RamSan-330's 16 to 64 gigabytes of fast RAID cache makes it available to any IT storage environment. By installing the RamSan-330 in front of RAID devices, bandwidth increases and response time decreases.

The RamSan-330's four to eight 2-gigabit Fibre Channel ports can be flexibly allocated to servers, switches or storage products. This means that a single RamSan-330 can simultaneously serve as a cache for multiple Fibre Channel RAID, JBOD or other storage devices. Storage vendors and solution providers have struggled to meet the needs of end users with increasingly demanding application environments, such as large, write-intensive databases. The RamSan-330 provides the solution by invisibly accelerating storage to the speed of SDRAM.

"We encounter many users looking for both high capacity and high performance from their storage environment, yet they are not ready to step up to the cost and complexity of large internal-cache based systems," said John R. Tibbitts, CEO with storage vendor INLINE Corporation. " This independent storage cache approach by Texas Memory Systems could boost performance and let customers continue to use the RAID systems they want."

"Solid state disk has an impressive history of boosting application performance. Some customers, however, need to dynamically accelerate all their data rather than a few gigabytes," said Woody Hutsell, executive vice president with Texas Memory Systems. "With the RamSan-330, we applied our solid state disk technology as an independent cache for Fibre Channel storage subsystems. We are offering it as a performance-enhancing solution for customers looking to balance high performance and capacity at a reasonable cost."

End users can use the RamSan-330 to overcome the costly bottlenecks associated with slow read/write performance across a large segment of data. It can accelerate existing storage 250 times by providing up to 250,000 IOPS and 3 gigabytes per second performance from cache. This translates into a 2x to 25x real performance improvement for applications. "In today's tight economy, CIOs are challenged to do more with less," according to David Hill, vice president of Storage Research with Aberdeen Group. "The ability to independently scale storage capacity and performance offers exciting potential to leverage their current storage devices."

The RamSan-330 is transparent to the operating system. It automatically caches frequently accessed blocks in its high-performance memory subsystem, improving read and write performance. Three cache modes are available for each cached storage device: write-through, write back, and read-ahead. The RamSan-330 delivers 3 gigabytes per second full duplex internal bandwidth. The system is battery-backed and will flush cache on external power failure simultaneously to the cached external storage devices and to internal hard disk drives. The system includes hot swap power supplies, hot swap backup hard disk drives, redundant fans and redundant batteries.

The Texas Memory Systems RamSan-330 is immediately available to storage manufacturers and solution providers worldwide.