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!