900GB PCIe Card Roll Out From Texas Memory Systems

Not too many IT companies have 17th-generation products but Texas Memory Systems does.

The venerable Houston-based company, which has been making solid-state memory for 32 years, came out May 17 with a new NAND flash-based Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) card called the “Gorilla” – a high-performance, half-length data accelerator with a massive 900GB of usable space.

“Add this to a direct-attached storage system and it’s like putting it on steroids,” TMS president Dan Scheel told eWEEK.

Gorilla On Steroids

The Gorilla – the product name is actually RamSan-70 – is the first release in TMS’ next-generation RamSan Series-7 product line. Scheel said it is capable of more than 330,000 I/Os per second with bandwidth exceeding 2GB per second.

The RamSan-70, aimed at the OEM storage market, is designed to be in-server accelerator for storage use cases such as onsite medical imaging, data warehousing, enterprise resource planning (ERP), sophisticated data acquisition, scientific computing and Web content, Scheel said.

For those who crave technical details, the RamSan-70 is the first product powered by TMS’s new Series-7 Flash controller, which is based on advanced Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays combined with an embedded PowerPC processor, Scheel said.

Unlike other PCIe cards, the proprietary hardware in the Series-7 Flash Controller handles all NAND flash management internally, which frees up host resources for workloads, Scheel said.

“IT managers are always looking for ways to increase I/O performance, reduce latency, and improve overall system efficiency,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager for Solid State Storage Technology at IDC. “A PCIe Flash SSD, such as Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan-70, can solve many of these issues.”

The RamSan-70 is scheduled to be available in June.