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TMS tries to tarnish IBM Quicksilver pitch

What's special about IBM's Quicksilver? Texas Memory Systems has launched its RamSan 5000 flash solid state storage product offering one million IOs per second - and it's available now, not in many months time. IBM recently demonstrated one million IOPS from a networked solid state configuration involving 40 or so Fusion-io …

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Barry Whyte
Paris Hilton

Devil is in the detail

While I knew this box was coming from Woody and co at TMS, and in principle the concept is similar at a high level to what we demo'd as Quicksilver, in this case the 1M comparison is not apples for apples.

Our 1M IOPs was run with a mixed 70/30 ratio of reads and writes at 4K blocks. We all know that writes are the problem child for flash, and in some cases mixed workloads are even worse.

The TMS spec sheets don't give anything other than 100% read numbers, and doesn;t qualify at what transfer size.

If we take this at face value, and assume its small blocks 512byte or 1K, then the real number to compare this against Quicksilver would be 4.7Million IOPs. That is, if we had quote pure read numbers for Quicksilver. That would however have needed more SVC nodes, and several more fully populated Power Systems 595 hosts...

I'd like to see the 'details' - as I'm interested what the RamSan can do with a more realistic real-life workload.

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