Colocation to Virtualization

We have had a RAM SAN on the network for a while now.  This is an amazing piece of hardware capable of speeding up any application.  If you have the money of course!  This is an expensive build, incorporating 2 Cisco MDS fiber switches, fiber cabling, and 4 fiber cards for the database server.  Also, we are running 4 gig fiber, not 2 gig.  This unit has made all database queries about 60% faster!  The following information was gathered for a report I gathered a few months back hence the timestamps on the interface captures.  Granted, this information was also out of our peak load times and are provided just for reference.  One thing to remember, this is an SD RAM solid state device, not a slower write wearing Flash solid state device.  Texas Memory is now selling a 250, 512 gig RAM device and also a Flash version.

http://www.superssd.com/

http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-400/

Texas Memory RamSan
Model:                         RamSan 400
Capacity:                     128 gig
Fiber Interfaces:          4
Interconnect Speed:    4gig (fiber)
Current uptime:          155 days

•    The four fiber interfaces are doing load sharing / balancing of traffic.  That’s 16 gig throughput!
•    At time of writing, the network load on the RamSan is currently running at 84.92 Meg a second.
•    Average 1,025 iop per second to the RAID controller

The RamSan is currently being utilized entirely to run an Oracle 10g R2 high
performance database.  The database server is connected via quad 4 gig fiber links into our Cisco fiber infrastructure.

Server Specifications:
Manufacturer:      IBM
Model:                 System x3755
CPU:                    Quad – Dual-Core AMD Opteron 3.2ghz
RAM:                   16 gig
OS:                      Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Switching: Hardware redundant fiber paths from servers/storage to switches.  We use Cisco MDS 9124 4-gig interconnect fiber switches.

Cisco 9124 Switch 1:
RamSan interface    Cisco Interface
fc400-2b                fc1/6
fc400-1a                fc1/7

Cisco 9124 Switch 1 fc1/6 Statistics

DB Server to RAM SAN Interface 1

Cisco 9124 Switch 1 fc1/7 Statistics

DB Server to RAM SAN Interface 2

Cisco 9124 Switch 2:

RamSan Interface     Cisco Interface
fc400-2a                  fc1/6
fc400-1b                  fc1/7

Cisco 9124 Switch 2 fc1/6

DB Server to RAM SAN Interface 3

Cisco 9124 Switch 2 fc1/7

DB Server to RAM SAN Interface 4

Redundancy:

We have had a power outage to this unit, and the device performed as expected. The internal battery kept the unit powered as it copied the data stored on its RAM memory to the backup SATA drives. The shutdown grace period set by the unit was for 5 minutes. The power came back online before the unit needed to do a total shutdown, but we were glad to see the unit acknowledge the problem and go into corrective measures to preserve the data on the device.