A new solid-state disk went on sale this week that will
vastly accelerate the performance of relational databases such as
Oracle 10g, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, returning important
queries on business data much faster.
A solid-state disk is a storage device that contains no moving
parts. It uses RAM memory boards, and its own processor to manage
data storage, making it a lot faster than a conventional rotating
hard-disk device. IT managers often use solid-state disks alongside
enterprise storage systems from EMC, Hitachi, IBM and others.
Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan-400 has multiple 4Gbit Fibre
Channel interfaces, and can sustain 3Gbytes a second of random data
transfers, making it the world's fastest storage, according to the
firm.
Claus Egge, European storage systems research programme director
at analyst IDC, said, "This sort of device used to be used with
mainframes and has more recently been applied to databases. It is
massively fast."
Donald Burleson, president of the Burleson Consulting Group,
said RamSan products had in the past provided database performance
improvements of up to 300 times. Tests with Oracle 10g are under
way, but he added, "We expect this new solid-state disk to be the
fastest high-speed I/O device for Oracle databases anywhere on the
planet.”