Texas Memory breaks records, budgets with blisteringly fast RamSan-440 storage device

Texas Memory has been around longer than most of you readers have been alive (or so we're told by our resident omniscient overlord), but it's been quite awhile since it was talked about freely in the same breath as WD, Fujitsu, Samsung, et al. Now, however, the company is making the rounds once more thanks to its "record setting" RamSan-440, which provides between 256GB and 512GB of RAM-based SSD storage, 600,000 IOPS, 4,500MB/sec random sustained external throughput and latency under 15-microseconds. The entire rig arrives in a 90-pound 4U rack-mount enclosure and claims to be "the first SSD to use RAIDed NAND flash memory modules for data backup." Chances are, you were already bracing to hear a pretty ludicrous figure when it comes to pricing, but $150,000 for the 256GB edition and $275,000 for the 512GB iteration? Please -- we'll take a Lightning GT, thanks.

[Via DailyTech]

[BuddyBoy @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:32PM]

Engadget giveaway?

[dustin @ Jul 23rd 2008 9:27PM]

o/ from VGND

[Shane @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:35PM]

I can't think of any set of circumstances that would justify that kind of cash outlay for such a small amount of storage.

[Conor Maher @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:37PM]

DNS server

[retro77 @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:40PM]

iWINS!!! [Internet Windows Internet Name Service]

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Internet_Naming_Service

[kjb434 @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:42PM]

Exactly, DNS servers would greatly benefit from a device like this.

[Wassasin @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:43PM]

The MMORPG EVE-online uses one of these, and it really helped reducing lag

[jason @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:43PM]

yeah, can you imagine how many hits a second they get

-____-

[JoeB @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:55PM]

It's definitely not about size. Its about speed.

EVE Online uses those. They have some ramsan400's.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=392

[Nexx @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:06PM]

o/ to fellow eve-o players.

[retro77 @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:36PM]

For the bleeding edge IT data center only.....

[allioxyzzy @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:37PM]

in ten years these will be cheap, in every machine, and we'll be looking back and laughing at this like we laugh at $30,000 10MB hard drives today.

[Nexx @ Jul 23rd 2008 10:02PM]

that's what i thought when i read this:

"The entire rig arrives in a 90-pound 4U rack-mount enclosure and claims to be..."

[Todd @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:38PM]

"Every thing's bigger in Texas!"

[El Taco @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:08PM]

and faster, apparently

[digitallysick @ Jul 23rd 2008 5:59PM]

DO WANT!

[rento @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:02PM]

Texas has memory?

[andres @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:22PM]

how do you think weve been remembering the alamo?

[jason @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:23PM]

maybe if engadget got one of these, their comment system would actually work.

[deyanimay @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:48PM]

Yeah, comments would show up instantly after posting so no one would have an excuse for double posting.

[deyanimay @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:48PM]

Yeah, comments would show up instantly after posting so no one would have an excuse for double posting.

[deyanimay @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:48PM]

O the irony.

[NineT9 @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:48PM]

lol ^

[NineT9 @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:49PM]

lol ^

[Mredraider @ Jul 23rd 2008 6:58PM]

Right... so I'm supposed to go tell the IS folks that they need to spend loads more on a few of these because I'm sick of waiting on a report... anyone else see me getting laughed out of the room?

[andrei030 @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:05PM]

4,5MB/sec? my HDD is faster is about 108MB/sec, maybe you wanted to say 4.500MB/sec not 4,500MB/sec.

[Matt @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:20PM]

You British? A comma is the delimeter in the US, not the decimal point.

[Kieran @ Jul 24th 2008 4:54AM]

I don't know the meaning behind the word delimiter, but I'm British and here the comma is used after every three numbers and the decimal point signifies a part of a whole number. Seems like andrei030 got it the other way round.

[BuddyBoy @ Jul 24th 2008 1:51AM]

I Don't think being British has anything to do with it. I'm British and I read and understood it correctly.

I think it has more to do with not reading the article properly.

[Chuck @ Jul 24th 2008 8:17AM]

Here in Italy we use a decimal delimiter, not a comma.

But since I'm American, I understand.

[Joerg Battermann @ Jul 23rd 2008 7:30PM]

We had the biggest RamSan config available last year in house for a couple days and.. real life performance is..another story. These are enterprise class SSDs and don't get me wrong.. are incredibly fast.. but only in certain scenarios.

Basically we have an oodbms based piece of software running which often has/had extremely low cpu utilizations but users were waiting nevertheless and bringing in a ramsan didn't change performance one tiny bit, even though all theoretical signs pointed at an io bound bottleneck and not a cpu bound one.

Internal transactions/copies/backups etc were in fact quite fast (at that time about a 2-3x increase to a normal raid-5/512mb cache storage subsystem), but real life performance increase was only about 10%.. top.

So we did not buy a 200k$ piece of hardware for 10% increase.. and I was disappointed after all the sales and marketing promises that we would benefit SO much ;)

However, I saw other usecases where the exact same device increased transactions throughput and decreased latency/waiting times by a huge margin... so for some businesses these price ranges are in fact a no-brainer.

[TheBear91 @ Jul 23rd 2008 10:35PM]

DNS? Come on, you don't need that much storage for DNS in the first place do you?

Better to create a cluster as to spread the load across multiple interfaces.

[Dunwang @ Jul 23rd 2008 11:39PM]

There's a huge demand for devices like this where latency is measured in milliseconds. I'm thinking specifically in financial services where banks must record every message coming in from feeds like the New York Stock Exchange. Such feeds burst upward 1,000,000 messages per second then taper down and banks freak if they miss even one of those messages.

[Phillip @ Jul 24th 2008 12:11AM]

What happens when it loses power?

[edward @ Jul 24th 2008 12:56AM]

Uhh FusionIO

[rektide @ Jul 24th 2008 1:25AM]

Honestly I dont really understand. In comparison, its not really stellar: A single PCI-E 2.0 8x slot is 4000MB/s. A mid-range Intel chip will have DDR2-1066 ram, which is PC8500: 17GB/s, twice what this thing is claiming. A four way Opteron should let you get to 128GB and four times that throughput (68GB/s, 15x more than 4500MB/s). I dont know what kind of IOPS a Quad socket Opteron can provide but it cant be too far off 600,000. Given the 140,000$ you'd save buying a Quad Opteron server instead, you should still have enough money left over to add some hot-failover redundancy and additional capacity. Is there any reason a huge ram-disk wouldnt blow this thing out of the water?

[rektide @ Jul 24th 2008 1:35AM]

Fact check: present server class Opteron processors for 4 way systems only go up to DDR2-666. Thats ~42GB/s. It can however support a maximum 256GB of ram. Phenom can support DDR2-1066, but that is single slot only.

[Chris @ Jul 24th 2008 1:46AM]

Uh...........I'm fine with my regular old 500gb hdd, but I'll get it in 10 years when its around the same price.