Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Texas Memory Systems Delivers First One-Million IOPS Flash Memory-Based Solid State System
Texas Memory Systems Ships the RamSan-5000 -- the Fastest Flash Memory-Based Solid State Disk System in the World to Go Beyond the Lab and Into the Marketplace
HOUSTON, TX -- (Marketwire) -- 10/28/08 -- Texas Memory Systems, maker of the World's
Fastest Storage®, today announced the availability of a new
groundbreaking one-million inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) solid state
disk system. The new RamSan-5000 is the fastest Flash memory-based system
in the world to go beyond the lab and into the marketplace. Additionally,
the system can scale to deliver several million IOPS using Texas Memory
Systems' new Turbo feature.
Solid state disk systems are used by large enterprise, government,
military, and research organizations to accelerate their most critical
applications. Faster systems can support more transactions and users with
fewer servers and licenses. As such they are more cost effective than
adding large hard-disk based systems, server-based RAM, or expensive
application tuning. Flash-based SSD systems like the RamSan-5000 offer
dramatically lower costs and power consumption than previously available.
"We were installing a 20 terabyte one-million IOPS RamSan-5000 at a
customer site while other vendors were announcing lab results," said Woody
Hutsell, Executive Vice President at Texas Memory Systems. "We won the
business because the system met strict performance requirements and was
determined to be the most cost-effective solution available, today or on
the horizon."
The groundbreaking RamSan-5000 solid state disk system provides up to 20
terabytes of RAID-protected Flash memory with a RAM cache of up to 640
gigabytes. It delivers 1,000,000 random read IOPS at under one-millisecond
response time and up to 20 gigabytes per second of read or write bandwidth
using either Fibre Channel or InfiniBand interfaces. The unique combination
of RAM cache to accelerate writes and Flash memory to accelerate reads
results in a system that is optimally balanced for critical enterprise,
research, and government applications, such as large OLTP systems or data
warehouses, video on demand, data rendering, geospatial analysis, seismic
processing, and data acquisition.
The RamSan-5000 offers power and data density advantages over available
hard disk-based storage solutions or yet-to-be shipped Flash memory
alternatives. It requires just 3,000 watts of power and occupies only 40U
of data center rack space to deliver a massive 1,000,000 IOPS. Deploying a
hard disk-based system with similar performance would require 5,000 hard
disk drives, consume over 90,000 watts of power, and require at least five
racks.
Texas Memory Systems' new Turbo feature allows users to lock a logical unit
of storage in the large RAM cache of the predominantly Flash-based
RamSan-500 units that make up the RamSan-5000 solid state system. The Turbo
feature transitions the RamSan system into a self-contained tiered storage
solution with frequently-accessed files placed in persistent RAM storage
while the remaining files are stored in Flash. A single RamSan-500 with the
Turbo feature can provide over 300,000 random IOPS based on a mixture of
accesses to the locked LUN and Flash memory. Therefore, a RamSan-5000
comprised of 10 Turbo-enabled RamSan-500s offers several million random
IOPS.
Texas Memory Systems (http://www.texmemsys.com) designs and builds the
World's Fastest Storage® and is the market leader in solid state storage
systems. Its award-winning RamSan products are used to accelerate
enterprise applications like OLTP databases, batch processes, and data
warehouses. Founded in 1978, Texas Memory Systems sells directly to large
enterprise and government organizations as well as through OEM and reseller
partners.
Texas Memory Systems, World's Fastest Storage, and RamSan are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Texas Memory Systems. All other trademarks belong
to their respective owners.