Texas Memory Systems' RamSan-810 Flash Storage Makes The Grade At Penn State University
RamSan-810 eMLC SSD system reduces nightly backup requirements by 6x; improves power, cooling, and floor space costs at leading higher education community.
Houston, Texas - May 15, 2012 - Texas Memory Systems, Inc., provider of The World's Fastest Storage®, today announced that the Research Computing and Cyber-infrastructure group(RCC) at Penn State University has implemented a RamSan-810 SSD system to dramatically reduce its nightly backup times while improving IOPS performance and minimizing related power, cooling and floor space costs.
The RCC group at Penn State provides systems and services that are used extensively in research, teaching and service missions by more than 3,000 faculty members and students to perform computational research. The group was overprovisioning capacity of 200 15K RPM hard disk drives in an attempt to generate acceptable IOPS in order to complete backup operations during a brief overnight window so as to not impact production processes. With backups taking as long as six hours to complete and degrading other system operations, the team at RCC determined that a solid state storage solution was needed to effectively handle the necessary IOPS load and replace the HDDs.
After evaluating SSD products from four vendors, the RCC team decided to implement a pair of RamSan-810 1U solid state units in a high-availability mirrored configuration that took advantage of the replication functionality of its IBM General Parallel File System. After installing the RamSan-810 systems, the RCC's nightly backup times improved by 6x, dropping from six to just one hour.
"With some of the other solutions we tested, we poked and pried at them for weeks to get the performance where the vendors claimed it should be," said Michael Fenn, systems administrator at Penn State. "With the RamSan, we literally just turned it on and that's all the performance tuning we did. TMS was the best solution largely because of its maturity and performance. It seemed very stable and it just worked out of the box."
The RamSan-810 is the first Flash SSD storage system from TMS to use Enterprise Multi-Level Cell (eMLC) Flash memory, a new technology that features high speed and reliability paired with the affordability of MLC. eMLC is perfect for read-intensive environments such as Penn State's, whose applications usage consists of an 85/15 read-write ratio, offering a better value than the increased write performance -- but higher cost -- of a Single Level Cell system.
Additional cost savings that RamSan storage creates when replacing traditional hard drive systems includes power consumption reduction by 90 percent, lowered data center cooling costs and smaller floor space requirements.
“The computational needs of educational organizations like Penn State can be taxing for all but the best-performing storage systems out there,” said Dan Scheel, President of Texas Memory Systems. “By developing a rackmount Flash storage system that combines speed, reliability and affordability, the eMLC RamSan-810 is able to deliver outstanding read-intensive IOPS to organizations that need to respond to the growing storage and performance needs of their users and applications. RamSan-810 is a greener, more-efficient alternative to traditional hard disk drive-based systems and an easier-to-use, real-world-proven option over other SSD products.”
About Texas Memory Systems
Texas Memory Systems (http://RamSan.com) designs and builds solid state storage systems that accelerate demanding enterprise applications. Its award-winning RamSan product line, known as The World’s Fastest Storage®, has continually delivered fast, reliable, and economical solutions to a broad range of enterprise and government clients around the world. Since its founding in 1978, all product design and manufacturing have taken place at Texas Memory Systems facilities in Houston, Texas, allowing Texas Memory Systems to meet the highest standards of engineering excellence and product quality.
SOURCE: Texas Memory Systems