Texas Memory Systems today announced that it is delivering open source drivers on Linux and Solaris for the RamSan-20, a high-performance PCIe* flash-based solid state disk (SSD) storage product for accelerating workstations and servers. By having open source drivers, RamSan-20 users benefit from additional control and can accommodate future needs and add enhancements as required. Installation of a RamSan-20 SSD can increase application performance by 2,500%, dramatically increasing the volume of transactions that can be managed and the number of simultaneous users that can be supported.

With this release of Linux and Solaris drivers for the Texas Memory Systems RamSan-20, the open source community has the ability to integrate and adapt high-performance SSD into an ever-expanding variety of environments. The open source community requires that code be available for review in order to provide supportability; by making the driver source available, Texas Memory Systems is empowering customers to easily port to custom kernels, currently unsupported operating systems, and add custom enhancements. This open flexibility expands deployment of PCIe SSDs into appliances using embedded Linux.

Texas Memory Systems has over thirty years of experience with PCI driver implementations making this announcement more of an evolution and less of a revolution. Competing PCIe offerings tend to invest less in the hardware implementation and rely on the driver and host computer’s resources to provide functionality. For such systems, providing open source drivers is impractical and would expose unnecessary complexity and proprietary code.

PCIe Flash SSDs have become a practical and intelligent alternative to disk drives for direct-attached performance-oriented applications. SSDs are typically used by large enterprise, government, military, and research organizations to accelerate critical applications and as an alternative to adding servers, RAM, or large energy-inefficient RAID storage systems. These faster systems support more transactions and users with fewer servers making resources more productive.

Open source drivers are a by-product of the design philosophy behind the RamSan PCIe SSD family. The core functionality of the RamSan PCIe card is in the hardware itself versus other PCIe designs where the driver does most of the work. This thin driver offers a simple control paradigm and is easy to port and manipulate as open source. It offers little burden to the host system and creates a nice division of labor between the host and the device allowing the host system to operate to its maximum potential.

"This latest round of driver development displays Texas Memory Systems’ ongoing commitment to its thought-leadership position within the enterprise market for Flash solid state disk designs," said Woody Hutsell, President at Texas Memory Systems. “This is the type of innovation that we have been delivering for over thirty years and we view our depth of knowledge and engineering expertise as a value that clearly continues to separate us from the pack in delivering value to our customers.”

The RamSan family of PCIe SSDs is available today from Texas Memory Systems and its global partner network. For more information visit: http://www.ramsan.com/products/ramsan-20.htm.

For information about other Texas Memory Systems products that deliver incredible levels of IOPS at extraordinarily low levels of latency, please visit: http://www.ramsan.com/products.htm.