Silver:
Dell/Microsoft Business Intelligence
Data Warehouse
www.dell.com, www.microsoft.com
Why it won: This is a marriage made in
heaven for SQL Server administrators: Dell rolled out a
line of servers preconfigured with SQL Server, easing installation
woes and providing top-notch performance.
Bronze:
Dell PowerVault MD3000i
www.dell.com
Why it won: The MD3000i iSCSI SAN array
gives you deployment flexibility and
simple sharing across multiple servers. Busy
database admins will appreciate the product’s userfriendly
UI, helpful wizards, and easy operation.
Storage Winners
Gold:
RamSan-500
Texas Memory Systems • www.texmemsys.com
Why it won: The RamSan-500 makes the jump
into SSD technology, providing the most storage
capacity for the best price.
The latest advancement in storage
technology, solid state disk
(SSD), provides numerous advantages over older
storage options. Because no disk rotation is involved,
data access is faster than with DAS, NAS,
or SANs—SSD access times range from 10 to 15
microseconds, which is 250 times as fast as hard
disk drives. SSDs also use less power than other
storage options, and the lack of moving parts also
increased reliability. The RamSan-500 provides all
these advantages and is one of the best SSDs on
the market today.
The RamSan-500 provides up to 2TB of storage,
with as many as 100,000 I/O operations per
second (IOPS) sustained random reads, 10,000
IOPS sustained random writes, and 2GBps of
sustained random read/write bandwidth. Texas
Memory Systems notes that “compared to a
similar capacity high-end hard disk–based RAID
system, the RamSan-500 can deliver in excess of
16 times the performance while using 50 percent
less power.” In addition, the RamSan-500 is priced
lower than competing products, so you get all
these bells and whistles for a price similar to enterprise
RAID storage. Michael Otey says that he
prefers the RamSan-500 to a similar product from
BiTMICRO “because of the RamSan’s price and
capacity.”
—Lavon Peters
See associated figure
Silver:
PS5000E
Dell • www.equallogic.com
Why it won: The PS5000E provides
cost-effective capacity, large scalability,
and optimal performance for common business applications.
Bronze:
E-Disk Altima ATA-133
BiTMICRO Networks • www.bitmicro.com
Why it won: The E-Disk Altima ATA-133 offers huge storage
capacities in a standard disk drive form factor.