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With our Exchange server, we use a Platypus Qik Drive to send our retrieval times through the basement. We put the database on Qik Drives (but mirror it hourly on to HDDs)...it makes our effective Exchange bandwidth limited to the gigabit ethernet port on the server.

you mean one of these?
http://www.platypus.net/20qikdrive.asp
2 slot model can hold 2 gigs
8 slot model can hold 8 gigs :-p
from page: "sustained data throughput speeds of up to 110MB/sec."
and if thats not enough, the cards can be spanned to create huge ram drives

This kind of thing has been around for a while...
Here

What you really want is a Platypus.

They have internal and external units, both for cache and as RAIDed hard drives.

Sorry, it should have been .net. So, here.

Platypus Technology does make something similar. They have both internal PCI and external enclosures to just hold sticks of ram; some models have stadard hard drives for times of power loss. Unfortunately under linux it requires a kernel module (and at the time I was using them, if I upgraded the kernel the company had to compile a new module to match). They fly though, they're sooo fast. Really nice for my mail queues.

Protected With internal UPS and automatic back-up to mirrored hard disk drives, QikDATA ensures maximum data protection. QikDATA can be configured without any single point of failure.

Extreme Speed
Takes advantage of the latest 64 bit, 66MHz PCI bus technology and SDRAM speeds - for sustained data throughput of up to 350MB/sec, allowing up to 40,000 I/O transactions per second.

Scalable
Each 1RU sized QikDATA provides between 1GB and 16GB of storage. Up to eight QikDATA units can be combined and spanned to create a single high performance drive of up to 128GB.

Simple integration
Has standard 1RU and PCI card installation. Can be formatted, partitioned or spanned like any other drive.

Easily serviceable
Units are easily accessed for upgrades and part replacement.
A quick search of CDW shows a price of $31,039.92 for the QikDATA 16GB unit.

If you back up the solid state with a hard disk, you can dump to disk when the battery gets too low.


You mean like this? We use a number of those here at $BIG_ISP for mail servers - put the queue directories and other temporary files on the RAM disk and the thing just flies, a CPU-limited mail system is indeed a nice thing.

Plug it into a UPS, should that die anyway then the internal batteries keep it alive long enough to write everything to disk for when the power comes back.

Not cheap, though.

• PCI cards with 1-8GBs of RAM (with external power for backup)
  
• 1U rack units (max 32GB, soon to be 128GB) with redundant power + onboard battery backup + *dual* redundant disk backups. These units interface to a PCI card, and you can chain 8 units (soon 16) together on one PCI adapter, so they scale really well.
  

The website provided is nonnavigable

Yes, it is a crapy website, after about 15 min I dicovered you click on a image to get to the 'qukdrive' info page here: http://www.platypus.net/pages/products_qikdriv2.ht ml.

I havent dled the pdf, but looks like no price info. Does offer drivers tho, so probably not vaporware.


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