Thursday, November 19, 2009

NextIO and RamSan PCIe Solution

SuperComputing has been a great success! Here is a picture of NextIOs PCI Expansion unit populated with 9 RamSan-10/20s:



and achieving over 1.3 million IOPS!


Check out our press release to find out more about this solution.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

SuperComputing '09: The Portland Experience

Monday was setup... We had assistance from one of our partners at ViON. It took all morning, but everything is up and running, except for our server for our live demo, but that should be remedied today :)

We stopped by NextIO's booth (2585) and checked out their PCIe expansion chassis. Their ICA-2800 chassis is populated with about 8 of our RamSan-10/20s. They are achieving over 1,250,000 IOPS!

The opening Gala was exciting. The exhibit hall was bustling, we had quite a few people stop by our booth (1035). Our partners from Canada, NetStor Technologies, stopped by, too.

I'll leave you with a picture of our booth, featuring the RamSan-6200, and our Director of Federal and Eastern Region Sales.


Thursday, October 15, 2009

Day Three OOW '09

Well, day three is over and so is the conference for yours truly. We gave away 500 of our new books and got to talk to hundreds of great folks who stopped by the booth. We gave 13 - 10 minute presentations on the new OPERA architecture as well. RIght now I am waiting to head for Atlanta and home.

I was speaking to someone at the booth yesterday and they mentioned attending Tom Kyte's presentation on the best new features of Oracle11gR2. Tom seemed to have said (according to who I was speaking to) that the flash cache feature will be generally available and not just restricted to Sun Solaris and Exadata2. If so that is really good news for folks with convential hard disk based systems. By adding a RamSan10 (225 gig) or RamSan20 (450 gig) to their servers folks could have immense flash caches operating at flash memory speed for frequently used data. Thus, by upgrading to 11gR2 and incorporating the 10 or 20 into their systems they could experience extreme performance improvement with n changes to their application!

I was also talking to someone elxe about the Exadata2 and how it would be interesting to put the Exadata processors on top on one of our RamSan620s and they asked something interesting, why put Flash on top of Flash? (flash cache on top of flash drives) which actually is a good question. It seems to me on second thought that most of the Exadata2 improvements where to compensate for the underling disk technologies. So, by using a RamSan620 you could get most of the hardware improvements from the Exadata2 without the additional costs! I would still like to see the affects of using the Exadata parallel query engine on top of the RamSan620. However, given that the RamSan10/20 has 50 microsecond access time there would still be some benefit to having an internal PCIe based Flash cache on top of 250 microsecond external flash.

Well, have a great day!

Mike

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Second Day OOW 09

Well, the second day has come and gone. We have given away over 300 of our new books and I personally gave 7-10 minute presenations about our new OPERA architecture. The crowd seems pretty good this year but I have been heads down at the booth so I haven't heard any numbers for the total attendees.

We had quite a rainstorm here yesterday so everyone was a little damp but it doesn't seem to be dampening enthusiasm. We are getting a lot of interest in the RamSan620 and in OPERA in general, seems people like the idea of a non-committed super architecture for databases. By non-committed I mean it doesn't have to run Oracle 100% of the time, even though we have utilized ASM and that would not be available if Oracle was not used.

I am writing this on the bus to day three so it will be a little short, hope everyone is enjoying OOW and come on by the booth!

Mike

Monday, October 12, 2009

OOW '09 Day 1

So, here I am early to the booth to review the presentation and make sure things are ready when over the PA they say "The Keynote address ended early so we will be opening up the vendor area early...in just a few minutes." So here I am by myself as the hordes of attendees swarm the booth. Luckily Woody showed up and between us we handled it until the other folks showed up at around 10:15. So far it has been a busy show with lots of interest in the 620 and of course in the books we are giving away. Well, have someone asking for a book to be signed so will blog more later.

Mike

Friday, October 9, 2009

Preparing for SNW Fall and Oracle OpenWorld

This has been a hectic week preparing for two of our most important shows, SNW Fall and Oracle OpenWorld.

This year at SNW Fall we are participating in the Solid State Storage Hands-on Lab. Our VP of Business Development, Neal Ekker, and Systems Consultant, Joe Bromley, will be manning that demonstration. They will be demonstrating the performance differences between HDD, a PCIe SLC Flash board (RamSan-20), and RAM-based solid state disk (RamSan-400). Our President, Woody Hutsell, will also be participating in the educational track this year. He is presenting "Solid Business, Shifting Vision: What users can realistically expect from SSS in the next 2 years." We will be at booth 1301.

Oracle OpenWorld should also be very exciting this year. Oracle Guru, Mike Ault, and Director of Sales Engineering, Jamon Bowen, will showing off a special demo at our booth (1227). Please stop by and check it out! Mike Ault will also be signing his new book, Oracle Performance Tuning with Solid State Disk.

We look forward to seeing you in Phoenix, AZ or San Francisco, CA!

Thursday, October 1, 2009

EVE Online Fanfest

Reykjavik, Iceland

CCP Games' Fanfest

Where in the world is Nathalie Bickley? On top of the world, that's where...

On Thursday, October 1 the CCp Games' Fanfest kicked off with a poker tournament whereby the proceeds went to Child's Play Charity and was then followed with the Royal Rumble sponsored by Texas Memory Systems. Royal Rumble is a free for all PvP (Player versus Player) tournament. In the interim were many chances for players to mingle and learn more about the ways of EVE Online.

Friday was a day chock full of presentations on what is to come for the EVE Online players, round table discussions, and PvP tournaments. Over the course of the day during these events CCP decided to take out some of their partners (including TMS, Vivox, and Microsoft) on a journey to go visit the beautiful glaciers. Once we reached the glacier destination via a caravan of well equipped off road trucks, we cruised around on snow mobiles to get a more intimate view. I have to say that it was an amazing and breathtaking experience. Especially in light of the fact that we went out during a mini-blizzard and enjoyed what is commonly known as a white-out...everywhere you look is just pure white.



Saturday was the big day for Fanfest. On the last day everything is geared towards big news that CCP wants to share with the fans. In that vein, the morning began with a presentation from partners of CCP that are viewed as valuable and important to the success that CCP has had thusfar. This presentation time offered TMS a unique opportunity to talk with the players about Texas Memory Systems' RamSan technology and what it means for the playing experience. CCP's CEO, Hilmar Veigar Pétursson then comes out to show what CCP has been working towards in order to further improve the gaming experience and the even bigger plans moving forward. And finally the big blowout party that CCP is known for..."Party at the Top of the World." Which is held in appreciation for all the players. To see more, you can find video footage on YouTube as well as the EVE Online website.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Texas Memory Systems' (TMS) new event blog. Since TMS participates in over 52 exhibition events annually we can be hard to keep up with.  We have created this space to keep you informed about where we are and what we are doing.

October is by far our busiest trade show month. This year we are participating in 13 events in October alone!  This week we kick off our first event: EVE Online's Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland.  We will be blogging live at this event so please follow us on twitter and keep checking our blog for updates.

Also, if you would like to find out more about our expansive portfolio of award winning SSD products, please don’t hesitate to visit www.ramsan.com  While there you can find out detailed information on our products, an enormous knowledge center, and interesting company information.

I hope you find this useful and we look forward to seeing you at some of these events!