RamSan-400

The RamSan-400 is TMS’ flagship RamSan model and the most advanced SSD on the market today. Its fast DDR RAM storage is ideal for storing performance-demanding data and accelerating application performance. In fact, the RamSan-400 is The World's Fastest Storage®. No RAID, no cache, no other solid state disk is capable of the raw performance offered by the RamSan-400.

Performance

TMS' numerous customers have seen real-world performance increases from 2x to 25x simply by installing a single RamSan. It plugs into servers or fabrics through basic Fibre Channel or InfiniBand connections and appears simply as a very, very fast drive to the network, able to act as any disk or storage system might. The RamSan-400 can accelerate numerous applications across industries. It is best known for producing dramatic performance gains in OLTP, batch processing, and other transaction-intensive operations.

Reliability

There is no tradeoff in reliability for all this performance. The RamSan-400 includes hot swappable redundancies wherever physical wear is a factor, such as power supplies and backup hard disks. It also includes three independent internal UPS systems to ensure that no power loss or power supply failure will stop the RamSan from performing its internal backup procedures. Redundant cooling fans and redundant failover data ports (optional) are also part of the sophisticated design.

Interoperability

The RamSan-400 is designed to look like a disk to the network. Therefore, it is highly interoperable and works in virtually any enterprise environment. It is installed in numerous environments, including Apple OS X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Hardware from Fibre Channel and InfiniBand vendors including Cisco, Emulex, Brocade, McData, Mellanox, QLogic, LSI Logic, and Vixel easily interoperates with the RamSan. 

Active Backup® and Chipkill Technology: The Newest Innovations in SSD
Exclusive to the RamSan is Active Backup® software. Other SSDs and cache systems can only "destage" data from RAM to backup disks once power is already lost. This means that data is never backed up during normal operation and the time-to-complete-backup after power loss is unacceptably long. A RamSan-400 with Active Backup can continuously back up data on RAM to the internal backup hard disks without impacting performance. This means in an emergency situation data is anywhere from 60-100% on the backup hard drives already.

RamSan-400 takes reliability even farther by implementing IBM Chipkill technology. Standard error correcting code (ECC) implementations correct single-bit data errors in memory chips but cannot correct the multi-bit errors that can result in data integrity issues. Chipkill technology allows a memory system to correct a multi-bit failure up to and including a total chip failure. 

Soft Error Scrubbing

All solid state disks can correct a single bit error before sending data to the server as a part of their ECC protection. The RamSan-400, however, goes a step further by scrubbing – re-writing the corrected data to memory and then verifying the re-write to determine if a memory chip has a failure (a hard error) or if radiation transients caused the single bit error (a soft error). Systems that do not scrub single bit memory errors will either a) report errors to a system log that will eventually encourage replacement of a memory board or b) hide these errors, thus leaving a potentially unsafe memory board in the system. Research on this topic suggests that 90% of single bit errors are soft errors. In these cases, the RamSan-400 will correct the error through the scrubbing process and prevent unnecessary downtime to replace memory boards.