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Since its creation in 1978, Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has been on the forefront of architecting, manufacturing, and delivering to market The World’s Fastest Storage®. The RamSan® line of TMS storage products represents the most trusted and broadest line of solid state storage systems in the market today. TMS RamSan® products are deployed in over 35 countries around the world and in the most mission critical environments on the planet. Installations that can only trust Texas Memory Systems and the RamSan® product line to accelerate the most critical aspects of their data centers include major financial exchanges, the world’s largest telecoms, secure government data centers, U.S. Department of Defense installations, enterprise grade clouds, eCommerce sites, major search engines, and enterprise data centers containing mission critical applications. Within these environments, TMS RamSan® products are used to accelerate mission critical database installations such as Oracle, Microsoft, or Sybase and business applications that are essential to the success of the business.
Contact information
Address
10777 Westheimer Rd
Suite 600
Houston
Texas
Telephone: 01179 237 984
Email: David.l@ramsan.com
Website: www.ramsan.com
Press Releases
Read Disturb Errors? Not with Texas Memory Systems
Texas Memory Systems Awarded Two New Patents.pdf 703.83 kB
Variable Stripe RAID
Texas Memory Systems Awarded a New Patent for Variable Stripe RAID.pdf 704.20 kB
32nm SLC 200,000 cycle Flash - That's different!
Case Studies
Valliant - SAP Oracle Acceleration
See how RamSan provides a x12 improvement for a SAP Oracle user!
Success Story - Valliant SAP - Oracle.pdf 1.51 MB
Banco Azteca Uses Texas Memory Systems
Banco Azteca, one of the two largest-coverage banks in Mexico, used Texas Memory Systems products to manage growth and improve performance.
Banco Azteca has more than 1,500 branches throughout Mexico and other Latin American countries and is already among the two largest banks in Mexico in terms of coverage. With more than 5.2 million savings accounts, Banco Azteca continues showing dynamic growth in every banking variable of significance. In addition to consumer credit for goods, Banco Azteca offers credit cards, personal loans, car loans, and mortgages, among other types of credit. Additionally, Banco Azteca furnishes payroll systems and acts as an agent for Procampo, a government agricultural financing program, reinforcing their presence in rural areas.
The Challenge: Manage growth and improve financial systems performance
Banco Azteca began to consider high performance storage solutions because they were willing to invest in order to have the most stable financial systems with the best response times to meet the high level of demands from their millions of clients. Director of Systems, Juan Arevalo Carranza, notes, “We need to continually improve on our business processes. It is important to offer better, faster, and more efficient service to all clients with accounts in Banco Azteca.” But success and growth brought information system problems. As data traffic increased, they began experiencing performance problems with their banking transactions because of degradation in response times from their enterprise storage array. These performance degradations also led to problems with application stability. Under periods of heavy load, the application was prone to lock up and deny features to Bank customers.
At first, Arevalo and his team considered RAM disk software, where server memory is presented as a disk drive to the application. “We initially looked for a solution that would let us move the main database tables to memory and improve our response times.” But this solution became too expensive because they would need to buy more memory for each of their servers plus additional software. They also looked at locking a LUN in the cache memory on their existing storage arrays, but this option was limited by the cache capacity and would have interfered with the normal operation of the cache. Arevalo adds; “We also thought about implementing new disks with less capacity and higher revolutions; however, we are still talking about response times in milliseconds, when we really require nanoseconds.” Banco Azteca eventually began analyzing solid state disk (SSD) products when they realized that other methods for improving application performance did not meet their objectives.
The Solution: Texas Memory Systems Tera-RamSan
After analyzing many different alternatives, Banco Azteca chose Texas Memory Systems (TMS) because they were the only vendor offering an enterprise-grade one terabyte SSD solution. Plus, TMS was the only company with adequate experience in financial systems database performance issues. Arevalo explains; “TMS has been with us since the beginning of the project because they had the necessary resources to find a solution to the problem we were experiencing at the time.” Texas Memory Systems could provide numerous examples of customers who had deployed their Tera-RamSan in performance sensitive applications. Furthermore, Texas Memory Systems recommended an advanced architecture which provided unbeatable performance and yet retained the high availability components already in place at the Bank. This advanced architecture integrated Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation Suite operating on the Bank’s HP Superdome servers running Microsoft Windows DataCenter, which provided host-based preferred-plex mirroring services to mirror the Tera-RamSan array with the Bank’s EMC DMX systems. All writes were synchronously mirrored to the EMC DMX, ensuring data availability and complete integration with the Bank’s existing disaster recovery strategy. All reads for the application are serviced by the extremely low latency Tera-RamSan solid state disk system.
The Result: Optimum response times
Once in production, the Tera-RamSan eliminated the bottleneck the Bank’s storage was experiencing and accelerated overall system performance back into the target ranges. “The Tera-RamSan solution since the day of implementation has been working perfectly,” Arevalo says. “We haven’t had any problems because the RamSan offers a high availability solution that helps guarantee that our equipment and systems will always be working and our data will always be secure.” Issues with application stability were resolved and when the Bank experiences peak demand, such as national holidays, the system responds as quickly as it does on slow business days.
“We have had excellent results, really spectacular, because now we can process a huge number of transactions in one day with lower response times,” Arevalo states. The initial Tera-RamSan deployment was so successful that Banco Azteca is planning to implement the RamSan as a standard solution in all new projects. The Texas Memory Systems solution provides continuous availability, data security, better database response times, and a much larger volume data transfer between storage and servers. Banco Azteca has already acquired additional Tera-RamSans in order to improve the performance of other applications and generate added value to the organization. “We hope that in the future storage will move toward SSD technology,” Arevalo says, “because it is a solution that offers optimum response times to companies handling huge data volumes and requiring immediate and continuous information availability.”
Whitepapers
The Case for Solid State Storage
Conventional wisdom says that computer systems and networks are becoming faster and faster by orders of magnitude as time goes on. In terms of processor clock rates, this is largely true. Storage devices, however, are relatively stagnant. Storage speed—measured by seek time, operations per second, total bandwidth, and other rubrics—has increased at a snail's pace compared to other aspects of computing.
This difference has created a substantial performance gap over the years, and more often than not computer systems experience some kind of substantial performance bottleneck due to storage devices. In high-demand networks, the performance gap is painfully obvious. All the fast servers in the world are wasted if storage can't carry out its orders fast enough. In situations where “hot files” and databases are constantly read from or written to by multiple sources across a network, this bottleneck creates a crisis for the entire network infrastructure.
Storage speeds lag behind processor speeds because most storage is constrained by physical considerations. A magnetic, spinning disk must be written to or read from by a physical arm traveling across the disk. Precious milliseconds go by as one part starts to spin up, then another moves to the appropriate area. According to StorageReview.com, the fastest hard disk drives have access times equal to 5 milliseconds (peak performance). Multiply this by the billions of operations demanded by users daily, and a considerable lag results.
Enter solid state disks. Solid state disks solve the problem of physical constraints by replacing hard disk drives with high speed circuitry. Instead of a rotating disk, a solid state disk uses memory chips (typically DDR RAM or Flash memory) to read and write data. Solid state disks allow storage to catch up with the rest of the computing world. Texas Memory Systems RamSan® RAM-based solid state disks have 15-microsecond access times (250 times faster than hard disk drives) and our RamSan® Flash-based solid state disks have 80-200 microsecond access times. The result is full utilization of existing processors. Instead of allowing expensive servers to constantly sit and wait for hard disk drives, your servers are busy increasing performance and operations per second. The bottom line is directly improved when servers do more transactions every day.
The immediate concern voiced about RAM solid state disks regards data persistence and volatility. Unlike magnetic disk drives, RAM-based disks require power to maintain their data. The solution to this is surprisingly simple: solid state disks include backup batteries and backup Flash or hard disk drives so that any data written to the DDR RAM can be mirrored or backed up. Our Flash solid state disks use non-volatile Flash memory as the primary storage media. The Flash solid state disks use DDR memory as capacitor- or battery-backed cache, which flushes any unwritten data to Flash memory in the case of an external power failure. Consequently, Texas Memory Systems RamSan® solid state disks, whether RAM- or Flash-based, offer complete data persistence.
Texas Memory Systems RamSan® solid state disks are designed to perfectly fulfill ever-increasing needs for The World's Fastest Storage®. RamSan® solid state disks not only outperform the fastest conventional drives hundreds of times over, but are many times faster than the closest competitor. Each RamSan® model outperforms all other brands of solid state disks while remaining simple in design, fully integrable with existing storage area networks, affordable, and scalable.
