US Government Upgrades RAM

Deep Throat writes "Techworld has the scoop on a new super-sized RAM disk that the US government has just bought for a few million dollars in order to speed up searching through huge databases. It's 2.5TB! The VP of the company that made it says it is for Washington DC and searching databases but won't say who. Techworld explains why it reckons it's the Department of Homeland Security searching in the NSA and Pentagon databases for terrorists. And apparently the government is 'very happy' with the purchase and thinking about getting more."

Comments

Like google

[robslimo]

Sounds like they're taking heed of Google's success in attaining blazing search speeds by holding all the data in RAM.

See here.

More stats

[Maskirovka]

A RamSan 320 unit holds up to 64GB of RAM in a 3U rack unit. The US government order is housed in three full height rack units. There are over 320 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and the aggregate I/O rate is 36Gbit/s.

No comment needed.

Re:More stats

[X]

Actually, the article is likely getting it's facts right. Check out the specs of the system.

Each Tera RamSan system can have up to 128 ports and 24 Gbit/s. It also can fill up to 2 full racks. Since the government system takes 3 full racks, I imagine it's a slightly different configuration, so reaching those numbers is not out of the question.

Note that the "aggregate I/O rate" number they are talking about is not the same as the aggregate bandwidth of the Fibre Channel ports. It's probably limited more by the memory subsystems than anything else.

Re:Power Failure

[eric2hill]

RTFA dude. "It also includes three independent internal UPS systems to ensure that no power loss or power supply failure will stop the RamSan from performing its internal backup procedures."

Re:It's awesome and all...

[Maskirovka]

How are they going to save the data if the power goes out? That's a lot of data to store on hard copies.

This is supposed to be a caching system, not a long term archive. They also undoubtedly have both Uninteruptable Power Supplies (think racks full of car batteries) and generators to protect from power failure. The databases that it caches are more than likely mirrored at multiple locations, and backed up daily, if not in realtime to an autmated tape library system.

A Single Disk Hit Kills Responsiveness

[AltoidsSuck]

If you go to disk, just once, you need about 9ms just to get the disk heads in position. If you're reading a file system of complex database, you now have multiple disk seeks and reads. That adds up. Seeking in RAM is orders of magnitude faster. That's why all the good search engines keep *everything* in RAM all the time.

That is why Google has multiple copies of the entire web in memory.

-AS

It is only a fraction.

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

Read the article- it refers to the 2.5 TB space being used as temporary query data storage for a 100TB+ databank.

[OT] Re:Watch out for Bad Electricity Days!

[sl956]

Even 15 years later it's still damn funny.

Just to set the record straight, the original author of this post is Jack Harvey, and it was originally published under the title "The Immortal Murderer" on January 18th, 1989 on DECUServe, the DECUS member bulletin board.
This bulletin board is still active under the name Encompasserve.org after mergers of Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq with Hewlett Packard.
The original publication can still be found on that bulletin board in the archived Soapbox conference, note number 168.

It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987.

For those of you who were not born, Monday 19-Oct-1987 was the day the stock market crashed.