Introducing the RamSan-20, a high performance Flash SSD on a PCI card. The RamSan-20 establishes the reference standard in PCI Flash architectures with its industry leading sustained performance, reliability, and density. Its simplicity and affordability will bring high performance storage solutions within reach of mainstream businesses and applications. The RamSan-20 displays TMS's continual ability to architect and engineer the future of solid state storage, leveraging 30 years of SSD innovation and 10 years of PCI experience.

The RamSan-20 leverages the internal architecture of Texas Memory Systems� award winning SAN-attached Flash SSD system, the RamSan-500. Given its comprehensive on-board management suite, the RamSan-20 has very little impact on host resources and data is not lost during server crashes or power loss. It is the highest capacity enterprise grade PCIe SLC Flash product on the market and provides far better sustained performance and reliability characteristics than competing products.

The RamSan-20 can be easily installed in a single server to transfer data much faster than other Flash drives and hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical hard disks. It allows users to simply snap in a very fast SSD for caching, application acceleration, and ruggedness without the space, power, and management overhead associated with traditional storage expansion

The RamSan-20 delivers a complete storage system on a PCIe card. It minimizes latency between the server�s processor and storage and is easily installed in minutes. The RamSan-20 delivers 450GB of usable Flash, making it the highest capacity enterprise class PCIe SLC Flash card on the market today. To ensure the greatest possible performance and reliability, the RamSan-20 utilizes Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash. It incorporates extra Flash capacity to accelerate writes and for two levels of data protection, ECC and RAID.

The RamSan-20 offers unparalleled sustained performance, delivering 120,000 IOPS for random read operations. With its fast PCIe connection, the RamSan-20 has a direct low-overhead connection to main memory that eliminates disk controllers, disk cables, and disk chasses. 

The RamSan-20 has the features you expect from an enterprise storage card. It was designed for performance, reliability, and simplicity:

• A storage system on a PCI card
• Low overhead, high performance
• High IOPS, bandwidth, and capacity
• Low power requirements
• ECC and RAID
• Embedded wear-leveling PowerPC
• Four Flash FPGA controllers
• Quick and easy to install

CPU
The RamSan-20�s greatest single asset is the use of an onboard CPU. With an onboard processor to manage the Flash memory and the card functions, the RamSan-20 stands alone in the PCI Flash SSD market. Its design limits use of CPU cycles or RAM space from the host system, thus allowing the host system to do its job of processing and managing application requests and needs.

SLC
The RamSan-20 uses SLC NAND Flash for its storage medium. SLC is faster, more resilient and much easier to manage than its consumer counterpart, MLC.

Manageability
The RamSan-20 is an easy to install, easy to manage block level device. Once the RamSan-20 driver has been installed, it will appear as a standard block device. At this point the product may be partitioned and formatted to any file system, not unlike any other enterprise hard disk drive.

Automatic Error Checking
Storage data integrity is provided by the use of SLC Flash chips with two independent methods of ECC. Each Flash chip incorporates an ECC data field within the chip for initial checking. Additionally, each Flash controller on the RamSan-20 is responsible for 20 Flash chips in RAID-5 configuration, thereby eliminating any single chip failure from corrupting data storage. The Flash wear-leveling algorithm runs on the embedded PowerPC, providing real-time quality assurance independent of the host computer.

Fault Resilient
The RamSan-20 was designed with the enterprise in mind from the chip up. With its onboard processor, 2 levels of error correction coding, RAID functionality for the Flash, use of SLC Flash and a sophisticated wear leveling algorithm, the RamSan-20 is at its heart an enterprise ready, fault resilient PCIe SSD.

PEP
The RamSan-20 provides extraordinary performance while consuming a very modest 15 watts of power. Being this powerful, yet Earth friendly can only be described using one word, PEP,
Powerful, Efficient Performance. At 120,000 IOPs and only 15 watts, the RamSan-20 delivers 8,000 sustained read IOPs per watt drawn.

The RamSan-20 offers a simple, economical choice for accelerating server-resident applications that require large, fast buffer areas and those that are random access intensive. Databases, video editing, financial modeling, data acquisition, simulations, and web content are some examples of applications that will benefit from the RamSan-20�s remarkable capabilities.

Specifications