TMS Torches SSD Storage

No one would accuse solid-state disk (SSD) supplier Texas Memory Systems Inc. of false modesty. Today, the company announced that its new RamSan-320 unit offers nothing less than the worlds fastest storage (see TMS Launches Fastest SSD Storage).

The Houston-based company, which was founded way back in 1978, boasts that its new SSD unit offers a full 3-Gbytes/s bandwidth and 250,000 I/Os per second (IOPS). That’s between three and five times faster than existing SSD offerings, and 10 to 25 times better performance than existing RAID storage, the company claims.

“We have actual customer sites that have seen up to 25 times performance improvement with our disk,” says Woody Hutsell, executive vice president of TMS. “We feel that that’s going to put us in an excellent position versus our competition.”

Hutsell also insists the RamSan-320 unit provides greater reliability. While most existing SSD systems incorporate a single RAID disk drive for backups, in case a power failure wipes out the system’s memory, the 320 has three disks baked in. In addition, an Active Backup feature enables the system to continuously back up all data from the memory to the disks, Hutsell claims.

TMS's competition begs to differ with its claims. Craig Harries, the vice president of product marketing at Imperial Technology Inc., TMS’s main competitor in this space, says that the kind of performance and backup TMS is touting may be cool, but not very useful. “Nobody’s really running at those rates today,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to find someone who’s doing 10,000 IOPS… It’s like buying a car that can do 250 miles an hour. If you’re driving on a road where you can only go 60 miles an hour… you can’t use it.” Imperial’s MegaRam offers 40,000 IOPS (see Imperial Snaps Out of It).