Ramsan's 2 TB rack of flash memory

San Diego (CA) – Need a few terabytes of really fast storage ? Texas Memory Systems will be able to solve that need in a few months with their upcoming RAMSAN-500 box that can hold up to 2 TB of Flash memory along with a maximum of 64 GB of DDR2 memory.

The flash memory is the primary storage for the 4U high rack-mountable box while the DDR2 acts as a very fast data buffer. The back of the 500 can have multiple Fibrechannel or Infiniband outputs.

At the Siggraph convention in San Diego California, Texas Memory Systems’ Executive Vice President Woody Hutsell told us that the device is primarily used for read intensive data bases and video editing (hence the presence at Siggraph). Big movie companies could story their source video footage on the RAMSAN-500 and then have teams of editors edit the footage simultaneously thanks to read latencies of just 0.15 ms and a 0.5 ms write time.

Hutsell told us that the RAMSAN-500 will be available sometime in the fourth quarter. The company will still sell its 400 model which uses all DDR memory. Hutsell added that huge drop in flash memory prices in the past years have made the 500 series much more affordable than other DDR-only storage boxes. “This will probably be $200,000 per terabyte on the high side,” he said.