TEXAS MEMORY SYSTEMS INTRODUCES FIRST 4-GIGABIT, HALF-A-MILLION I/O PER SECOND, SOLID STATE STORAGE SYSTEM TO ACCELERATE DATABASES AND OTHER CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

Texas Memory Systems, makers of the World's Fastest Storage, announced the availability of the RamSan-400 - the industry's first solid state disk with 4-gigabit Fibre Channel interfaces. The RamSan-400 is currently the only storage device that can sustain 3 gigabytes/second of random data transfers or 500,000 random I/Os per second. Its exceptional performance makes the RamSan-400 ideal for accelerating I/O-intensive databases, OLTP (online transaction processing), OLAP (online analytical processing), modelling, content streaming and high volume data acquisition environments.

"In our experience with I/O-bound databases, RamSan technology has delivered amazing results with up to 300X performance improvements," said Donald Burleson, President of the Burleson Consulting Group and author of several books on database tuning. "Our experts thought it unlikely that this cutting-edge technology could be even faster, but the engineers at Texas Memory Systems have amazed us again. We expect this new solid state disk to be the fastest high-speed I/O device for Oracle databases, anywhere on the planet."

Burleson Consulting is conducting a TPC-C test benchmark with the RamSan-400 solid state disk and Oracle 10g, and preliminary results indicate that the latest RamSan is significantly faster than those tested in their previous works. The results of this testing will be included in their upcoming bookOracle RAC and Grid Tuning with Solid State Disk.

"Frequently SQL Server, DB2, SAS and Oracle users find that the actual capacity required by the database is small compared with the RAID capacity that must be purchased to get decent I/O performance," said Woody Hutsell, Executive Vice President at Texas Memory Systems. "As a result, these organisations are discovering that solid state disks are the least expensive solution for improving performance."

The RamSan-400 is covered under Texas Memory Systems' performance guarantee. The guarantee is designed to encourage organisations with application performance issues to look beyond less effective solutions such as adding processors, RAM, hard drives, monolithic RAID or constantly re-coding databases and to test a solid state system in their own unique IT environment. Under the program, Texas Memory Systems guarantees that RamSan solid state disks will deliver faster performance than any competitive storage product and that software application performance will be accelerated to the satisfaction of customers.

Capacities for the new 3U RamSan-400 currently range from 32-gigabytes to 128-gigabytes of RAM. IBM ChipkillT -based technology is used by Texas Memory Systems to help protect database and other business critical applications from serious multi-bit memory errors that can cause data corruption and unscheduled system downtime. Additionally, the RamSan-400 high-availability architecture includes redundant and hot swappable power supplies, redundant batteries, a four disk RAID with hot swappable backup hard disk drives and Texas Memory Systems' unique Active BackupT feature. The RamSan-400 is immediately available. Existing customers can upgrade their RamSan systems to include 4Gb/s Fibre Channel controllers.

Texas Memory Systems' solid state disks are used worldwide alongside enterprise RAID systems from EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Sun and others. Stock exchanges, financial trading firms, e-commerce sites, telecommunications companies, government agencies and an increasing number of smaller firms use solid state disks to provide a level of performance not available from hard disk-based systems alone.