The Fastest, Cheapest Storage System in the West

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Texas Memory Systems has published Storage Performance Council results that are hotter than a bowl of West Texas chili and just as cheap.

The company, which has trademarked the term World’s Fastest Storage, says its RamSan-320 solid state disk achieved an SPC-1 I/O operations per second (IOPS) rate of 112,491.34, eclipsing 3PAR’s mark set last month, and the company’s price-performance value of $1.50 also set a new benchmark.



Texas Memory Systems RamSan-320

TMS RamSan-320


The $169,000 system had a total ASU capacity of 68.719 GB.

Company spokesman Woody Hutsell says the RamSan-320 “is used to accelerate applications, mostly database-oriented. Most of our customers use these systems to store the most frequently accessed parts of the database (redo logs, temporary database segments) or the entire database.”

SPC-1 tests emulate typical Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) environments, such as those found in e-commerce and financial sectors. The results are most relevant for IT users with performance-intensive applications.

Solid state storage is similar to RAM cache, Texas Memory says. Unlike hard disk drives, it does not use rotating media, so data seeks are faster. The company says solid state disks are more reliable than typical hard drives because there are no drive heads to crash. Solid state systems are much more about speed than capacity, the firm says; they are usually deployed to accelerate demanding applications.

Because of its speed, networkability, and low cost per IOPS, Texas Memory says solid state storage is useful for demanding application environments such as OLTP, online analytical processing (OLAP), databases, modeling, and high-definition non-linear video editing. Typical users include corporations in the financial, telecom, and e-commerce sectors, and government, research, and military organizations.

“With these SPC-1 performance and price-performance records coming from Texas Memory Systems, it’s easy to understand why solid state disk is gaining traction in data centers,” states Chuck Standerfer, senior partner at Evaluator Group. “SPC benchmarks are a helpful, independent measure for IT customers who are trying to improve the performance of their application environments and determine their ROI on new storage purchases.”

The results can be found at http://www.storageperformance.org/results.html.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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