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see also:-
Texas
Memory Systems - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com and
Texas Memory Systems' - storage
tuning blog
- editor's comments:- December 2011 - Texas
Memory Systems, has been operating continuously in the SSD market longer than
any other company. Despite that the company has often surprised me with its
technical and marketing innovations. TMS was the first oem to deliver an SSD
product line which spanned both
RAM SSDs and
flash SSDs - when
in 2007 it
added rackmount flash SSDs to its pre-existing RamSan product line.
Texas
Memory Systems is often listed in -
the Top 10 SSD Companies
and the Fastest SSDs.
TMS
are
legacy (rather
than new dynasty and
big (rather
than small) SSD architecture. In the
RAM cache flash
SSD spectrum TMS is never at the skinny end.
who competes with
Texas Memory Systems?
In the
rackmount SSD
market - TMS has long outlived most of its early pioneering competitors. In
today's market their toughest competitors are likely to be
Violin,
Kaminario and
Kove.
In the
PCIe SSD market -
which is tough for everyone - TMS's toughest competitors are probably
Virident Systems,
STEC and
OCZ. You may think that
perhaps I should have put Fusion-io
at the head of this little list - but I disagree. Apart from some government or
university research projects - I think it's rare that any seriously minded
enterprise customers would consider FIO's ioDrives and TMS's RamSans as
interchangeable for the
reasons described in
this article. |
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In
July 2008 - Texas Memory Systems announced the
RamSan-440 - a fast 4U
rackmount RAM SSD with 512GB capacity and 4Gbps fibre-channel interfaces. It
delivers 600,000 sustained random IOPS and over 4GB/S of sustained random read
or write bandwidth, with latency of less than 15 microseconds. The RamSan-440
uses RAID protected flash instead of hard disks to backup and restore data in
case of a power outage. Data from the RAM SSD can be instantly accessed on power
up and the full SSD is restored 20x faster than with hard disk backed RAM SSDs.
In
December 2008 - Texas Memory Systems announced it had supplied
Santa an SSD
system to help accelerate processing of the "Naughty or Nice" lists in
time for Christmas.
In January 2009 -
Texas Memory Systems
announced that its SSD revenue in 2008 had grown 20% compared to 2007,
and that it had also achieved record revenue in Q4 (the time when the
Credit Crunch
iceberg hit the Titanic world economy hard enough for even the 1st class
passengers to take pause).
In February 2009 -
Network Appliance
announced support and interoperation between its Performance Acceleration Module
and the RamSan-500 flash
SSD systems from
Texas Memory Systems.
In March 2009 -
Texas Memory Systems
unveiled a PCIe SSD
that will ship in Q2 2009. The
RamSan-20 has
450GB of RAID protected SLC flash with 80 microseconds latency. R/W bandwidth
is 700MB/s and 500MB/s respectively. Sustained IOPS are:- 120,000 random read,
and 50,000 random write. Endurance is rated at 12 years (assuming 25% continuous
writes). List price is about $18,000.
Also in March 2009 -
Woody Hutsell, President of Texas
Memory Systems - shared his
SSD Bookmarks
with readers of
StorageSearch.com
In
April 2009 - Texas
Memory Systems announced the
RamSan-620 - a 2U
rackmount SLC
Flash SSD with 2TB ($88,000 list price) to 5TB capacity and 2 to 8
FC or
InfiniBand ports.
Throughput is 3GB/s. R/W latency is 250µS and 80µS respectively.
Transactional performance is 250,000 random IOPS. Power consumption is 325W.
Multiple RamSan-620s can scale to higher capacities. Upto 100TB can fit in a
single 40U rack.
In August 2009 -
Texas Memory Systems launched the
RamSan-6200 a 40U
rackmount SSD
with 100TB of SLC
flash storage, 5 million IOPS performance and upto 60GB/s throughput - which
uses approximately 6kW of power. It's a scaled up system that combines 20x
RamSan-620s in a single
datacenter rack and uses TMS' TeraWatch software to provide unified management
and monitoring from a single GUI console.
In September 2009 -
Texas Memory Systems expanded its IP
base with the acquisition of data management patents and source code from
Incipient. This
technology acquisition
will allow TMS to further differentiate its industry-leading RamSan line of
solid state storage solutions. Incipient developed scalable storage
virtualisation and management capabilities over a period of 8 years. During that
time, the company made significant technological advances and was awarded
multiple patents.
In October 2009 - Some of the technical
folks at Texas Memory
Systems have contributed to a new book called -
Oracle
Performance Tuning with SSDs - written by Oracle expert, Mike Ault.
This is part of an august collection of Oracle tuning books published by
Rampant
Press.
Also in October 2009 -
Texas Memory Systems
announced
that its RamSan-620 - (2U
5TB SLC flash SSD, price $220,000 approx) - has achieved a
record
setting SPC-1 result. It produced 254,994.21 SPC-1 IOPS with average
response time of 0.72mS and at a cost of only $1.13 per SPC-1 IOPS - which is
better than any competing RAID or Flash solution.
In November 2009 -
NextIO entered the
rackmount SSD
market via an oem agreement which leverages multiple
225GB / 450GB PCIe SLC
SSDs made by Texas
Memory Systems.
Available immediately, the
14 slot NextIO
application acceleration appliance can be configured and reconfigured with
any mix of servers and TMS SSD cards depending on system demands. Pricing for a
basic configuration starts at $19,500, which includes implementation, training
and onsite application or database tuning assistance.
In January
2010 -
Texas Memory
Systems announced
it is delivering open source drivers on
Linux and
Solaris for its
RamSan-20
PCIe SSD accelerator.
In April 2010 -
Texas Memory Systems
announced the
availability of the RamSan-630
an FC /
InfiniBand
compatible 3U
SLC SSD with 4 to 10TB capacity, 500,000
IOPS,
8GB/s bandwidth, and R/W latency of 250 / 80 microseconds in a 450W power
budget.
In September 2010 - Holly Frost founder of
Texas Memory Systems
has written a paper (pdf)
which describes how variants of the company's newer SSDs like the
RamSan-630 have been used
recently by the US DoD and Intelligence Community. In
another article he
describes some features of their 1st DoD SSD in 1988. The company launched its
1st commercial enterprise SSDs in 2001 - but has continued evolving its
defense based array processing capabilities.
In November 2010 -
in a webinar -
Texas Memory Systems
disclosed that the company already has more than a petabyte of its enterprise
SSDs installed and running in customer sites (mostly in banks and telcos). The
webinar also discusses the different types of SSDs in the market, types of
customers and why enterprise customers use its SSDs to accelerate apps
performance.
The associated presentation also compares latency and IOPS
for PCIe and external rackmount SSDs.
In January 2011 -
Texas Memory Systems
announced the availability of 8Gbps fibre-channel interfaces for its
RamSan-630 - fast 10TB
3U rackmount SLC SSDs. Each unit can be configured with upto 10 independent
8Gb FC ports for a total data transfer rate of 8 GBytes / sec. Ports can be
mixed - with the previously available (and 25% faster)
InfiniBand. See the
interview which exclusively reveals -
key performance
enablers inside the RamSan-630.
In May 2011 -
Texas Memory Systems
unveiled imminent availability of a new fast
PCIe SSD - the
RamSan-70
- a 900GB (SLC) 1/2 length card with 330K / 160K R/W IOPS and upto 2GB/s
throughput.
In June 2011 -
Texas Memory Systems
announced imminent availability of the
RamSan-710
- a 1U rackmount
SSD with 5TB usable SLC flash storage with 2 dual ported 8Gbps
FC ports upto 2 40Gbps
InfiniBand ports.
Throughput is quoted as 5 GB/s - although no IOPS figure was mentioned at press
time. The system includes various
reliability
options- including N+1 batteries to support orderly
shutdown
and an internal active spare flash card configuration option which provides
protection levels beyond RAID.
In
August 2011 - Texas
Memory Systems
launched its
first MLC flash based SSD. The
RamSan-810
is a 10TB FC SAN MLC SSD in
a 1U rackmount
package - with 320K IOPS performance.
In September 2011 -
Texas Memory Systems
promoted an independent
PCIe
SSDs benchmark test (pdf) - which illustrates the performance of its -
RamSan-70. The
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre - which
earlier published similar reports about competing PCIe SLC SSDs - said - "The
RamSan-70 provided by far the best IOPS result we have ever measured..." |
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| will new
RamSan rattle Violin? |
Editor:- December 6, 2011 -
Texas Memory Systems today
announced
imminent availability of the
RamSan-720
- a 4 port (FC/IB) 1U
rackmount SSD
which provides 10TB of usable 2D (FPGA implemented)
RAID protected and hot
swappable - SLC
capacity with 100/25 microseconds R/W latency (with all protections in
place) delivering 400K IOPS (4KB), 5GB/s throughput - with no single point of
failure (at $20K/TB approx list).
The new SSD uses a
regular RAM cache
flash architecture which in the event of
sudden power
loss has an ultra reliable battery array which holds up the SSD power for 30
seconds while automatically backing
up all data in flight and translation tables to nonvolatile flash storage. On
power up - the SSD is ready for full speed operation in less than a minute.
Aimed
at HA tier 1 storage markets - the RamSan-720 consumes only 300-400 W - which
makes it practical for high end users to install nearly 1/2
petabyte of SSD
storage in a single cabinet - without having to worry about the secondary
reliability and
data integrity
risks which can arise from high temperature build-ups in such
enclosures.
Editor's comments:- I've
been talking to TMS every month for over 10 years - and I've been writing
about their memory appliances since the early 1990s - so you might think that I
would have run out of things to say by now. When I saw the preliminary specs
for the new RS-720 - the features which jumped out at me were:-
- the low R/W latency for this class of SPOF product. Which is 2x as
good as the next fastest product I know - the 6000 series fron
Violin - and several
times faster than some other tier 1 SSD vendors such as
Kaminario and
Huawei Symantec
- the high storage density - over 3x better than
Violin delivers in SLC -
and close to the usable RAIDed capacity that a
Fusion-io 1U server
can deliver in MLC when using Octal.
A few days ago I spoke to
Holly Frost, CEO
and Dan Scheel,
President of Texas Memory Systems about their new SSD, what they think about
what's going on in the SSD market, and the philosophy that steers the design
of their SSDs. In a hour long discussion I learned enough new stuff to write
several new articles. So instead of condensing it down here into a couple of
bullet points - I'm going to give you the benefit of what I learned in a
new article tomorrow called -
"StorageSearch
talks SSD with Holly Frost."
Going back to my headline - will
new RamSan rattle Violin? |
 |
I'm sure that Violin would
say that this simply validates what they are doing (and shipping) already - and
that the enterprise SSD market is big enough for all vendors in this category
to keep
growing at a healthy clip. It make you wonder how much a company like TMS
might be worth too... | | | |
| ... |
| "Texas Memory Systems
has shown that it's not going to be bit flipped aside by changing market
fashions in memory technologies or form factors - although it was indeed almost
the last of the enterprise SSD makers to introduce MLC (naughty flash) into its
product lines this year..." |
| ...Editor:- from the
new edition of
the Top SSD Companies. | | |
| ... |
| the fastest PCIe SLC SSD |
Editor:- September 27, 2011 -
Texas Memory Systems
is promoting an independent
PCIe
SSDs benchmark test (pdf) - which illustrates the performance of its -
RamSan-70.
The
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre - which
earlier published similar reports about competing PCIe SLC SSDs - said - "The
RamSan-70 provided by far the best IOPS result we have ever measured..."
"It
wouldn't surprise anyone if they heard me say that when speed and performance
are critical to the success of a company's business, there is no better solution
on the market today than the RamSan-70," said Holly Frost, CEO of
Texas Memory Systems. "But to have those claims backed up by independent
testing by a respected organization like the Swiss National Supercomputing
Centre, we are able to validate the hard work we've undertaken to achieve our
results. |
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"We went head-to-head
against
Fusion-io and
Virident and we
came out on top. Add in our exceptional service, and there's no reason to turn
to anyone other than Texas Memory Systems." | | | |
| ... |
| the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs? |
Are you tied up in
knots trying to shortlist flash SSD accelerators ranked according to
published comparative benchmarks?
You know the sort of thing I mean -
where a magazine compares 10 SSDs or a blogger compares 2 SSDs against each
other. It would be nice to have a shortlist so that you don't have to waste too
much of your own valuable time testing unsuitable candidates wouldn't it?
StorageSearch's long running
fastest SSDs directory
typically indicates 1 main product in each form factor category but those
examples may not be compatible with your own ecosystem.
If so a
new article -
the 3 fastest PCIe
SSDs list (or is it really lists?) may help you cut that Gordian
knot. Hmm... you may be thinking that StorageSearch's editor never gives easy
answers to SSD questions if more complicated ones are available.
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But in this case you'd be
wrong. (I didn't say you'd like the answers, though.) ...read the article | | | |
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