RamSan-710

The RamSan-710 speeds up high-performance enterprise storage area network (SAN) environments. Customers around the world use RamSan SAN storage for applications like:

• Large centralized databases
• Reporting and data warehousing
• Rendering and video editing
• Modeling and simulation

Compatible with Fibre Channel and InfiniBand
interface cards and fabrics, the RamSan-710
appears as a standard block device to applications.

Reliability

• Standard chip-level RAID and patented Variable Stripe RAID™ (VSR™) protection against plane and chip failures
• Enhanced Error Correcting Code (ECC) protection against block failures
  
• Available integrated spare Flash card limiting maintenance downtime
  
• Redundant power supplies with active failover protection against single-source power issues

Architecture
The RamSan-710 continues the TMS tradition of high bandwidth, low latency systems with most control logic implemented in hardware. It is built with 21 Flash boards powered by the proprietary Texas Memory Systems Series-7 Flash Controller™. The boards are connected through a high-speed internal data switch, along with two dual-port Fibre Channel or InfiniBand interfaces and a management controller offering an
Ethernet interface.

Variable Stripe RAID™ (VSR™)
The exclusive patented Variable Stripe RAID™ feature offered by the Series-7 Flash Controller reduces business interruptions and improves mean time between failures (MTBF) by providing a higher level of protection against common Flash plane failures and less common Flash device failures. VSR complements standard error-correction
techniques to enable continued system operation in the event of Flash failures. It improves on traditional RAID by providing greater stripe size granularity and variable stripe sizes, allowing the controller to skip bad areasrather than failing or replacing them with a full spare chip. VSR accomplishes this by allowing XOR RAID stripes to
be dynamically resized for distribution across fewer Flash devices. When a Flash device failure is detected, data is migrated to new stripes that do not include the failed chip or plane.

Ultimate Write Performance and Reliability
The RamSan-710 includes reserved Flash storage space used to maximize performance and reliability. 19% of the raw capacity is overprovisioning, and 11% is RAID overhead. Overprovisioning—the practice of including Flash storage space inaccessible to the user—increases write performance, primarily because it provides a supply of blocks that do not need to be erased before writing. Texas Memory Systems products typically have more overprovisioned space than competing products. RAID overhead is storage space for checksums and other redundant forms of data that provide effective failure recovery.