Posts by Mike Ault

With the cost it is not knowable

If they won't say what their 15TB of Fusion_IO will cost how can we answer this? Also, how many CPUs and how much memorywill it take to manage 15TB of Fusion-IO cards? I know we (TMS) can provide 20TB of flash in a high availability configuration for around $320K street price. That would include all the needed CPU and memory to manage all the cards, the enclosure and needed FC/IB interfaces.

Again missing a few facts

The TMS RamSans have duplicate controllers internally. The internal components are RAIDed at the chip level as well as having ECC and chipKill technologies . We get redundancy for the backplane the same way Kaminario does, by having more than one system. For customers that require that full redundancy we sell them two that they use RAID 1 to mirror. RamSans are configured using an easy to use web based GUI interface. From box to being used takes about 30 minutes.

Our RamSan440 is DDR RAM based with up to 512 gigabytes of fully usable capacity that provides 600,000 IOPS at 15 microsecond latency. We can provide 1,200,000 IOPS in 6U of space using the RamSan440. Two RamSan630s, again in 6u, can give you 1,000,000 IOPS at 80 microsecond write and 250 microsecond read times if you don't like the price on the RamSan440 but still want the IOPS.

All our numbers are backed up by published SPC-1 results. I don't see any certified published results from Kaminario, just a bit of hand waving. Afraid Kaminario has a bit more mountain to go.

Mike Ault

(Mike works for TMS)

Might want to check some numbers

Chris,

Interesting article but for one minor discrepency.

Each RamSan400 is capable of 400,000 IOPS by itself, in a similar sized array the number of IOPS available would be much higer than 1,000,000. For 4 TB we would actually recommend the RamSan440 for its larger capacity and 600,000 IOPS. At 4 TB that would be eight of the RamSan440's with a capacity of 4,800,000 IOPS and latencies of less than 50 microseconds (15 microseconds at the FC interface). Unlike the FusionIO card, these IOPS come at no penalty to the host CPU, in fact the host usually ends up with more usable CPU cycles per second since fewer are spent waiting on IO.

Of course the RamSan-500 is capable of 100,000 IOPS (more if most are cache hits) and provides 2 TB of capacity with an additional 64 GB of DDR cache with up to a 15 microsecond latency to the FC interface best case and 200 microsecond latency worst case. Putting two 500s together for a 4 TB array would yield at least 200,000 IOPS.

Otherwise, nice article!

Mike