Texas Memory Systems RamSan-320 review

We tested transfer rates by running two instances of the open-source Iometer utility configured with 64KB transfer requests and ten I/Os for each client. This reported top speeds of 98MB/sec and 110MB/sec respectively, which equals a cumulative total of 1,664Mb/sec - near wire-speed for a 2Gb/sec Fibre Channel connection. The RamSan-320 uses dedicated paths to memory for each Fibre Channel port, so to test this we created three LUNs, assigned them to different network ports and direct-attached three clients. Re-running Iometer on each system saw transfer rates of 191MB/sec, 195MB/sec and 196MB/sec respectively for a staggering cumulative total of 4,656Mb/sec.

Although memory prices may be at an all-time low, for network storage the RamSan-320 is still a luxury item and the price puts it firmly in the enterprise space. But for a storage solution that provides unbelievably fast access to data and a wealth of features, look no further.

Author: Dave Mitchell