Ninjamurai

I don’t normally post too much about the contracts I work but this one is just so cool I had to post something. One of the gaming companies I work with ( might be Blizzard me not say ) is working with some pretty hot tech and I am setting up a test site for them to pound it with data to see if it is worth the upgrade.

The first item is a StorageSpire

StorageSpire

This is about as cool as it gets. The StorageSpire is a 1TB Solid State Disk ( SSD ). It is made for high transactional operation ( like, um, World of Warcraft for example ). Very nice stuff and we are using FibreChannel to hook it into the test, but I am hoping to switch to InfiniBand for testing. We might end up with FibreChannel in the end, but I am a fan of InfiniBand myself.

We also are testing out some pretty cool rack mount SSDs made by Texas Memory Systems. These RamSan - 440s are the fastest SSD in existence.

RamSan 440 - Fastest SSD in the World

Serious, these things are FAST with all caps man. Anyway, we use drives like this for big banking apps and the like. I got brought in on this team to try how well they would work in gaming. MMOs are just big database apps anyway AND certain ones are making pretty good money, SO why not try putting the app on some serious server power.

To say the least, early tests are pretty impressive. I get latency of basically a couple MS like 10-12 ms even in a very large “instance” say, uh, for instance, Shattered Halls. Not to bad considering what the usual is.

I don’t know if this will ever make it into the real world, but it is pretty cool none-the-less.

Oh you want to know how much… uh, well, how about $250,000 a piece for the 512GB version and we have, uh, 4 of them at the test site. So, we are testing your game with $1,000,000 worth of harddrives! YES!

Tags: RamSan, SSD, StorageSpire