Violin Memory Announces Flash Storage Platform – All-Flash Primary Storage at a Cost Lower Than HDDs!

Violin Memory, Inc., a pioneer of award-winning all-flash storage arrays, is announcing worldwide availability of their new Flash Storage Platform (FSP). The offering includes their new 7300 and 7700 all-flash arrays, with simple management control via Violin’s new Concerto OS 7 and Symphony 3 software. FSP offers the ultimate simplification and consolidation of next-generation data center workloads. FSP delivers top-performing storage at the lowest capital and operating expenditure levels possible – all-flash, all workloads, all performance, and all at a cost lower than traditional mechanical HDDs.

Violin’s 7300 and 7700 Flash Storage Platform designs lower the effective cost-per-gigabyte by over 75% as compared to Violin’s prior generation of storage arrays, and are priced at a level that is over 25% less (cost-per-gigabyte) than competing solutions. With larger deployments, FSP provides all-flash storage at an effective cost as low as $1.50 per gigabyte. For the first time ever, data centers can upgrade their primary storage to all-flash at a lower cost than HDDs. The primary storage market is estimated to be worth nearly $15B (that’s ‘billion’ with a ‘B’), and it has now been opened wide to all-flash based systems.

The key to this major engineering achievement is Violin’s Concerto OS 7 operating system, which combines system-level flash management and control, block-level de-duplication and a compression data efficiency engine, and one of the most complete sets of data management, protection, and recovery services available into a single integrated operating system. Compare this to Violin’s previous all-flash storage arrays that required users to utilize three separate GUIs (graphical user interfaces) to manage their array. Concerto OS 7 is managed by the user through Violin’s Symphony 3, which provides ultimate granular control of all features with the most elegant and simple storage management solution in the industry, for any workload, application or LUN level.

The Flash Storage Platform’s 4^th-generation Flash Fabric Architecture (FFA) creates unprecedented levels of density, scale and performance. The 7300 FSP offers an effective 217TB in a three rack unit space, while the 7700 FSP is a six-shelf configuration that exceeds an effective 1.3 petabytes, providing industrial scale and density of over 2.2 petabytes effective in a single rack. Violin’s Flash Storage Platform attains 1,000,000 IOPS with sub-microsecond latency that delivers greater performance and greater capacity for greater workload consolidation.

According to Kevin DeNuccio, CEO of Violin Memory, “The Flash Storage Platform is a game changer for our customers and the industry as it creates the tipping point for enterprises to capture the promise of flash for all primary storage workloads, and to migrate and refresh disk storage to all-flash cost effectively. At the same time, customers gain 10X performance improvements for most applications. These performance improvements deliver efficiencies that can completely change the competitive dynamics of most industries by removing the latency and bottlenecks created in the data center by legacy disk. The Flash Storage Platform delivers the performance of flash, and enterprise-grade data services, including user selectable block-level, inline de-duplication and compression at end-user costs that compete with traditional disk array prices on a single, simple, powerful platform.”

Violin is utilizing a unique “pay-as-you-grow” business model for potential entry-level converters to an all-flash array. The 7300E (entry-point) contains a full 125TB effective of flash, but users can start with as little as 34TB effective, and then add additional capacity as their growth supports it. Additional capacity is opened up by virtue of a software license key that is provided by Violin, and can be seamlessly expanded without any additional hardware upgrades, and without any increased architecture footprint.

Steve Dalton, Violin’s SVP of engineering, notes that “For the first time, customers no longer need complex solutions with multiple components running different software environments and fragmented feature sets. With Concerto OS 7 as the foundation for the Flash Storage Platform, data protection, data reduction, performance, and scalability of the vast majority of primary storage needs are met in a single enclosure running a single operating system managed through a single pane of glass.”

Those of us who closely follow the flash storage industry have long-awaited the day when flash storage costs directly compete with (or even best) the costs of traditional spinning disk HDD storage. Today’s announcement from Violin Memory shows that this day is almost right on top of us, and certainly much closer on the horizon than many realize. By virtue of the 7300, 7300E and 7700 Flash Storage Platforms, combined with Violin’s Concerto OS 7 and Symphony 3, shows that Violin Memory have positioned themselves for huge growth potential. Other players will be left playing catch-up.

You can view Violin’s press release with today’s announcements in its entirety at the Violin Memory website here.