Subscribe to SQL Server Magazine | See More Backup and Recovery Articles Here | Reprints | Or get the Monthly Online Pass—only $5.95 a month!

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.

End of Article

Prev. page     1 2 3 4 5 [6]     next page -->



Post Your Comments Here

You must be a registered user or online subscriber to comment on this article. Please log on before posting a comment. Are you a new visitor? Register now

Reader Comments

Very nice, informative review w/o any hype.

wallysvp

Article Rating 4 out of 5

@ wallsvp:

Thanks for the kind words. Are there certain aspects of the awards issue that you liked more than others? We're always looking for reader feedback on our awards programs, so let me know what you think.

You can also email me directly at jjames [@] windowsitpro.com if you prefer.

Thanks -

- Jeff

jeffjames

Article Rating 4 out of 5

 
 

ADS BY GOOGLE