Applications & Industry Solutions

Our customers use RamSan solid state disks to solve a variety of business challenges.  Find out more about how the RamSan can help you accelerate your application:

Applications

Database Storage
Web File Sharing
Video on Demand
Identifying Hot Files
Overcoming the Performance Gap

Industry Solutions

Defense
E-commerce
Entertainment
Financial Services
Telecommunications

Other Applications

RamSans are perfect for a number of other applications.  We are working with companies on applications ranging from:

• Data Acquisition
• Data Modeling and Simulation
• Non-Linear Video Editing
• Seismic Processing
• High-Definition Video Playback
• E-mail Acceleration
• Data Warehouses

If you do not see your application listed, please contact us and we will be happy to discuss options for implementing the "World's Fastest Storage ®".

Applications

Database Storage

The number one application for state disks is database acceleration. RamSan systems are used to accelerate OLTP, decision support, data warehouse and batch systems with Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, Universe, Informix, Postgres, and other database management systems.

The RamSan accelerates databases by very nearly eliminating the latency associated with database physical input/output (I/O). The extraordinary low latency of our solid state disks combined with their high peak I/O means that a RamSan system can easily handle the most demanding I/O loads. RamSan systems are currently supporting environments at stock exchanges, financial traders, telecommunications and e-commerce websites.

Regardless of the database management system, the following components are good candidates for being migrated to a RamSan:

• Redo logs
• Indices
• Roll-back segments
• Temporary database files
• Most frequently accessed tables

When the entire database, or the most frequently accessed files are moved to solid state disk, the entire application speeds up. Depending on the number of files moved to the RamSan, I/O wait time should be virtually eliminated. For most applications, implementing solid state disk results in 4X to 10X improvements in throughput. Additionally, application features that were originally constrained due to storage I/O performance can be implemented thus delivering a richer feature set to system users.

Why Solid State Disks

Decreasing application performance under heavy user loads is not a new story for most enterprises. As the number of concurrent users increases, the response time to users also increases. The knee-jerk reaction to this problem is to look at two likely sources for database performance problems:

• Server and processor performance.  One of the first things that most IT shops do when performance wanes, is to add processors to servers or add servers to server farms. 
• SQL Statements.  Enterprises invest millions of dollars squeezing every bit of efficiency out of their SQL statements.  The software tools that assist programmers with the assessment of their SQL statements can cost tens of thousands of dollars.  The personnel required to painstakingly evaluate and iterate the code costs much more.
• In many cases, these likely sources for database performance problems are just masquerading the true cause of poor database performance:  the gap between processor performance and storage performance.  Adding servers and processors will have a minimal impact on database performance, and will compound the resources wasted as even more processing power waits on the same slow storage.  Tuning SQL can result in performance improvements, but even the best SQL cannot make up for poor storage I/O.  In many cases, features that rely heavily on disk I/O cannot be supported by applications.  In particular, programs that result in large queries and that return large data sets are often removed from applications in order to protect application performance.

Visit the Oracle Performance Resource Center for more information. In some cases, it makes sense to migrate the entire database to solid state disk. This is only necessary in situations where performance cannot be compromised or where access to the database is fairly uniform and characterized by a high number of concurrent users.

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Web File Sharing

The rapid adoption of the Internet as a favored means for accessing information has led to enormous demands on application infrastructures.

Companies and public sector organizations alike have responded by offering a plethora of services and products over the Internet.  The availability of useful information has only reinforced the trend toward more Internet access.

Users accessing information over the World Wide Web or even via corporate Intranets used to be pretty understanding when it came to delays.  It was reasonable to expect that performance problems were caused by the modem connection.  However, the number of people surfing through high bandwidth DSL, Cable Modem or WAN connections has sky-rocketed.  These savvy users will not wait more than a few seconds for their clicks to be answered.  Internet latencies account for some of the delays that these users experience, however, many delays are caused by equipment inside the firewall.   In fact, a Keynote study entitled "A Performance Analysis of 40 e-Business Web Sites", found that the major difference between the performance of these sites was differences between download times (or the gap between when a document was requested and when it was delivered).  The sites with the worst performance had by far the worst content download times.  For the bottom performers content download time was four times as slow as the top performers.  The Keynote study isolated the individual components that cause delays in Internet access.  In other words, the download delays are not caused by Internet latencies.  

Because companies are consistently monitoring performance from industry leading web sites, there is a lot of pressure to offer the best possible response times.  Another result from the previously identified Keynote study is that the amount and type of content on the page had a measurable impact on response time.  Therefore, companies that are seeking to maximize response time are minimizing content.  In the perfect world, it would be possible to achieve both of these objectives:  rich content and rapid content delivery.  The RamSan systems enable this by removing storage bottlenecks and delivering content as rapidly as possible from inside the firewall.

Download times are strongly influenced by the web server infrastructure.  As most companies have a handle on their server infrastructure, storage can often be isolated as the primary cause of download latencies.

Unfortunately, the burgeoning web infrastructure is also impacting the efficiency of IT shops.  With web server farms frequently consisting of tens of servers, manageability becomes a real issue.  One of the primary concerns is managing version control.  In the typical web server farm, web content is stored locally on each server.  When content needs to be updated, it is usually completed server by server.  This process introduces the possibility of error in the update, can result in web content being out-of-synch between servers, and requires human intervention to monitor.

The solution is to move web content to a RamSan system.  Web content tends to be composed of a large number of very small files.  The best way to use the RamSan for web content is in coordination with SAN file sharing software or to put the RamSan behind a NAS filer.  The File Sharing White Paper provides an excellent description of the approach needed to share the RamSan in order to serve web content.

By storing web content on the RamSan, web content download times can be substantially reduced, richer web content can be delivered, fewer web servers can be used and TCO can be lowered.  Because the web content is stored in memory accesses to data occur in microseconds.  Additionally, the RamSan performance is not impacted if the number of users scale upward.  RamSan systems can easily handle concurrent users.  Because a traditional limitation on web content has been the effect on download times, enterprises have had to compromise quantity and quality of content in order to get performance.  The RamSan changes the paradigm and allows rich web content to be delivered at incredibly high speeds.  Centralizing storage on a fast solid state disk will also improve the efficiency of the web servers and their processors.  Efficiency is improved because I/O wait time is eliminated on the servers; therefore they can spend more time processing user requests.  A job that previously required 20 servers may be able to be accomplished with less servers.  Finally, the RamSan helps lower TCO by offering a low cost way to centralize web content storage.  Fewer servers need to be purchased and operated.  System manageability increases because storage content is centralized.  Web content updates can be made to one central location without taking down any servers.

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Video on Demand

One look at a large video on demand installation and you can quickly recognize that streaming movies to thousands of users is not an easy task.

The difficulty of the task is reflected in the number of servers needed to do high volume streaming.  There are two challenges associated with video on demand that are the cause of performance problems:

• High number of concurrent users.  Many video on demand installations are designed to meet the needs of hotels, subdivisions and entire cities.  All of these installations are likely to see periods where there is a high number of concurrent users.
• Random content access.  Video streaming is typically a fairly easy task for hard disk drives.  Sequential access is the one thing that they are good at doing.  Unfortunately, video on demand does not result in sequential disk accesses.  Video on demand allows users to start, stop, pause, rewind, and fast-forward stream content.  Add in concurrent users and the activity to access the stream becomes random.  This is where most video on demand installations fall apart.

The net result of these two challenges is that video on demand installations look like supercomputing sites.  It takes clusters of servers to provide the bandwidth and content needed to provide video on demand.

Using a RamSan in conjunction with existing video on demand servers is an excellent alternative.  The problem with the existing video on demand servers is not their processing power or bandwidth capabilities, it is their storage.  The RamSan can be used to augment the existing storage for video on demand systems.  For example, it is possible to store the forty most popular movies on a RamSan-400 or as many as 640 movies with a RamSan-500 system.  When a new movie is released, which coincides with frequency of access, put that movie on a solid state disk.  The RamSan's content can be shared across multiple video on demand servers without contention.  The RamSan-400’s and RamSan-500’s bandwidth makes them a great fit for large installations.  The RamSan-400 can deliver close to 24,000Mbps of stream content to video on demand servers.  The RamSan-500 can deliver close to 16,000Mbps of stream content to video on demand servers but for a much larger data set.

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Identifying Hot Files

Software is available to tell you what data needs to go on a solid state disk.  The task of determining which files need the performance boost of Solid State Disk (SSD) has traditionally been the responsibility of the System or Database Administrator (DBA).  In order to make this task more accurate and much easier for the administrator we have partnered with hyperI/O LLC to provide this functionality utilizing their file I/O tracking software "hIOmon".  The software monitors file system access and keeps track of file usage statistics enabling a clear and simple method to locate files which need the high performance of our RamSan.  This can be used initially to determine the size of SSD needed and then on a continuing basis to determine if new files become active enough for SSD.  This provides a great way to monitor file system performance and to utilize solid state technology to the fullest extent.

System Requirements:
Microsoft¨ Windows NT¨ 4.0, Windows¨ 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003

To download click here:
http://www.hyperio.com/hIOmon/Download/hIOmonDownloadInfo.htm

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Overcoming the Performance Gap

For years, storage architects have observed the growing divide between processor performance and storage access times. When processors wait on storage, your users are waiting on storage. 

In addition to the growing gap between storage performance and processor performance is a similar chasm between bandwidth and storage performance.  Bandwidth is becoming available at rates that exceed even the improvement in processor performance.  Already today, there is a glut of bandwidth that is now available to enterprises for a much lower cost than was ever possible.  With almost unlimited bandwidth, the demands on the remainder of the data center only intensify.  From the firewall to storage, every aspect of system performance will need to be analyzed for bottlenecks.

Storage densities are increasing, and data access problems are only getting worse. Going forward, storage managers are required to balance the need for capacity with the need for performance. There are no easy solutions to the problem if the options only include hard disk based JBOD or RAID systems. It is the mechanical aspect of hard drives that ensures they will always be much slower than the server or in capable of filling massive enterprise bandwidth.

There is, however, a solution.  Store the data that your users and applications access the most frequently on solid state disk.  Studies have shown that the majority of storage accesses are against a small percent of frequently accessed files.  I/O wait time as these files are accessed creates the majority of delays that slow down mission critical applications.  By moving these frequently accessed files to solid state disk, it is possible to dramatically improve system performance.  The following lists many of the applications.  If you do not recognize your application in the list, please call us and we can discuss the fit of the RamSan Systems with your application.

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Industry Solutions

Defense

Timely information saves lives.  Any delay in the speed of a decision or intelligence analysis can put lives at risk.  The wake of September 11th and the United States' entrance into the War on Terrorism have placed unprecedented pressure on the military industrial complex and the Department of Defense.  As though political and environmental factors are not enough, our armed services and intelligence community must tackle technology initiatives that seek to simplify by centralizing systems and storage.  These initiatives expose previously hidden bottlenecks.  Texas Memory Systems products help the Defense industry respond to these challenges.  We know that military applications have always demanded more than civilian applications.  For over 15 years, Texas Memory Systems has developed hardware to support national security.  Our focus on performance means that defense industry companies, agencies, and institutions can:

• Quickly acquire data from multiple high-speed sources
• Rapidly analyze information and make decisions
• Protect sensitive data

Defense

• Make better decisions faster.  In the defense industry, there is a constant tradeoff between the time it takes to make a decision and the accuracy of the conclusions.  On the battlefield, in the skies, or at the command center, there is no shortage of data, just a shortage of information and conclusions.  Traditional approaches to storage cannot move fast enough.  At Texas Memory Systems, our fast storage enables you to acquire data and analyze it as fast as your people and supporting technology will allow. 
• Consolidate servers.  Throughout the Department of Defense, the pressure is on to consolidate servers in the wake of a massive buildup of server clusters and server farms.  The key is to consolidate servers without losing application performance.  Solid state disk technology promotes server consolidation by getting more out of your existing infrastructure.  Reinvigorate servers that are currently waiting for data from slow hard disk based storage system by attaching them to a solid state disk.
• Improve user satisfaction.  Many defense industry applications are the same types used by commercial industries.  Military human resource systems, accounting systems, and web sites must deliver the same high-levels of user satisfaction while minimizing costs.  Your commercial market counterparts use Texas Memory Systems technology to speed up their databases by storing the most frequently accessed data on the fastest possible storage.

Intelligence

• Rapidly acquire and analyze real-time signals.  Nobody gathers more data faster than the intelligence community.  Information originates from all parts of the spectrum - through radar, sonar, and satellites.  Rapidly acquiring this data is no small accomplishment, and Texas Memory Systems has designed products to do that for over 15 years.  Many of our systems support specialty interfaces for capturing this data and support industry standard interfaces for analyses.
• Protect sensitive data.  In some cases, protecting sensitive data requires a storage medium that is highly redundant, highly available, and secure.  In some unique cases, protecting sensitive data requires a volatile storage media that can insure that all user writable data can be destroyed when needed.  Texas Memory Systems solid state disks accommodate both of these data protection views in a single chassis.  Because our products rely on SDRAM, you can permanently erase sensitive data without destroying the storage device.
• Improve user satisfaction.  Some intelligence community applications are the same types used by commercial industries.  Database applications, modeling tools, and web sites must deliver the same high-levels of user satisfaction while minimizing costs.  Your commercial market counterparts use Texas Memory Systems technology to speed up their databases by storing the most frequently accessed data on the fastest possible storage.
• Maximize your existing infrastructure.  One problem is consistently found in data centers - idle processing capability.  Implementing faster storage fully utilizes expensive platforms and extends their lifetimes, which enables agencies to delay expensive and time consuming upgrades.

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E-commerce

Fast response times mean more business.  With light-speed latencies already amplifying response times for your customers, the last thing you need is for your storage to introduce additional delays.  For many e-commerce companies, the growth of the Internet creates exponential increases in user volume.  Particularly during peak periods, higher volumes cause unanticipated response time delays for buying customers.  As though business factors were not enough, technology initiatives that seek to simplify through centralizing systems and storage expose previously hidden bottlenecks.  Your infrastructure is your business.  The e-commerce CIO must make decisions that have an immediate return on investment (ROI).  Respond to these challenges with products from Texas Memory Systems.  Our zero access time storage means that e-commerce companies:

• Improve customer satisfaction and grow their business.  For most hours in most days, your infrastructure can handle your traffic levels.  However, those hours and days when customer inquiries and transactions inundate your site, you need a RamSan solid state disk.  A RamSan helps you handle peaks with the same efficiency that your current system handles the slow times.
• Scale performance.  E-commerce companies understand the need to scale performance.  Unfortunately, for most e-commerce businesses, scaling performance means buying more processors or more servers.  A solid state disk from Texas Memory Systems can scale to support over 10 million transactions per minute.  You might not need it all today, but as your business grows, the RamSan is ready to grow with you.
• Cut IT management costs without sacrificing performance.  As e-commerce companies grow, so do the number of servers dedicated to web serving, email processing, and database systems.  The grim reality is that many of these servers are underutilized because they are waiting on hard-disk based storage to return data.  Vast quantities of servers lead to management headaches.  By returning data faster than other storage systems, the RamSan helps you get more from each server, which enables server consolidation.

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Entertainment

High performing storage enables innovation.  Few industries challenge technology the way the entertainment industry does.  The migration to high-definition formats, increasingly elaborate special effects, and rapid adoption of digital technologies, push entertainment companies to adapt their infrastructure.  As though business factors were not enough, technology initiatives that seek to simplify through centralizing systems and storage expose previously hidden bottlenecks.  Modern applications are attempting to push the boundaries only to find that the platforms supporting the applications are a hindrance.  Entertainment industry customers can respond to these challenges with products from Texas Memory Systems.  Our focus on high-bandwidth, low latency solutions means that entertainment industry companies:

• Extend work models to new technologies.  For many companies, the move to high definition video changes the way they work…for the worse.  The bandwidth requirements of high definition video overwhelm environments that used to support collaborative development and shared files.  The pain caused by the migration to high definition is building as are the number of your companies looking for creative technologies to restore lost productivity.
• Improve customer satisfaction and grow your business.  If your business is manipulating high definition content, then you improve customer satisfaction by working faster and with higher quality.  If your business is streaming video content, then you improve customer happiness by streaming immediately and without the glitches that degrade images sent from hard disk based storage.  Solid state storage is a versatile tool for expanding your business. 
• Maximize your existing infrastructure.One problem consistently found is idle processing capability. Implementing faster storage better uses your expensive platforms and extends their lifetimes, which enables companies to delay expensive and time consuming upgrades.

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Financial Services

Time is Money.  This phrase drives business throughout the world, but the phrase rings loudest to the financial industry.  Growing customer bases, expanding on-line real-time transactions, and burgeoning regulations, all increase the burden on financial services data centers.  As though business factors are not enough, technology initiatives that seek to simplify by centralizing systems and storage expose previously hidden bottlenecks.  Modern applications that search to deliver on the promises of OLTP and OLAP send wave after wave of transactions and complex inquiries to burdened platforms.  Financial services companies respond to these challenges with products from Texas Memory Systems.  Our focus on performance means that financial service companies can:

• Quickly respond to customer inquiries
• Expand internal and external service offerings
• Reduce batch processing times
• Improve profitability

Further reading

SSD and the Securities Industry
The 451 Group Analysis of Using SSD in the Financial Services Industry
Utilizing Solid State Disks in the Financial Industry

Banking

• Improve customer satisfaction and grow your revenue.  Your revenues depend on offering this information with a minimum of human interaction.  The migration from personal services to ATM to on-line banking brings more transactions into the data center.  Traditional approaches to storage have solved your problems for years, but today's growth and complexity encourage banks to adopt solid-state storage technologies at a rate higher than any other industry.
• Faster processing earns you more money.  Between meeting regulatory requirements and processing customer transactions, few industries have more demanding batch processing requirements than banking.  Solid state disk technology enables you to complete batch processing more quickly, which benefits your own bank account, enables extended on-line service hours, and allows time for needed preventative maintenance and upgrades.
• Maximize your existing infrastructure.  One problem consistently found in banking data centers is idle processing capability.  Implementing faster storage fully utilizes your expensive platform and extends its lifetime, which enables you to delay expensive and time consuming upgrades.

Securities

• Acquire market data faster.  Your computer systems need up to the second data on security prices to drive analytical systems and time market purchases.  With the rate of market transactions today, gathering this data requires systems that can handle unprecedented numbers of small transactions.
• Improve customer satisfaction.  The time between an order's submission and its market placement or between an inquiry and its response can make or break a financial services company's relationship with its clients.  Solid state disks improve response times and process more transactions than hard disk drive based storage systems.
• Maximize your existing infrastructure.  One problem consistently found in securities data centers is idle processing capability.  Implementing faster storage fully utilizes your expensive platform and extends its lifetime, which enables you to delay expensive and time consuming upgrades.
• Scale performance intelligently.  For the storage industry, scalability usually means scalability of capacity. But what about performance? Capacity scalability only solves one problem - the inevitable swelling of data over time.  It does not solve the problem of the increased popularity of specific data over time. For example, an enterprise database grows in size and requires additional capacity over time.  As the database grows with the company, user will access some data increasingly often.  Additional storage does not fix this problem, but faster storage from Texas Memory Systems does.

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Telecommunications

When real-time is not fast enough.  Nothing needs to move faster than data through telecommunication’s infrastructure.  New business models that empower customers simultaneously offer challenges and opportunities to Telecomm companies.  The convergence of voice and data is finally reaching the individual consumer.  Offering new services that meets the latency-free demands of impatient customers is not trivial.  Accurately and quickly billing customers using these services is even more challenging.  As though business factors were not enough, technology initiatives that seek to simplify by centralizing systems and storage expose previously hidden bottlenecks.  Telecommunications companies respond to these challenges with solid state disks from Texas Memory Systems.  Our zero-access time storage allows you to:

• Offer and expand new services.   Whether you are in the process of adding new features, such as SMS or MMS, or looking at the next value-added feature for your customers, these new services are affecting your existing infrastructure.  Many of the new features increasingly require telecomm equipment to serve multiple functions from routers to server to storage.  A single RamSan is fast and small and complements telecomm infrastructures exceptionally.  It takes many RAID cabinets to equal its performance capability.
• Improve customer satisfaction and grow your business.  For most hours in most days, your infrastructure handles your traffic levels effortlessly.  However, when peak time customer transactions flood your system, you need a RamSan solid state disk.  A single RamSan helps you handle peaks with the same efficiency that your system handles the slow times. 
• Scale performance. Telecommunications companies understand the need to scale performance.  As the number of concurrent customers increase or when more customers are taking advantage of a service, you need equipment that can grow with your customer-base.  A Texas Memory Systems solid state disk can scale to support over 10 million transactions per minute.   You might not need it all today, but as your business grows, the RamSan is ready to grow with you.

For more information on the Solid State Disk or the RamSan product line contact the NAS sales team on 0870 752 6250 or complete and submit your contact details on the form provided under Contact Us