Violin Memory Releases Speedy Flash Appliance with 4 Terabytes of Storage

Violin 1010 provides high-performance Tier-0 Flash storage

• By James E. Powell
• 11/12/2008

Violin Memory, Inc., a scalable memory appliance vendor, has released of its Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash Modules for the company’s Violin 1010 memory appliance. The Flash technology provides more I/O operations per second (IOPS) and what the company said in a statement is “significantly lower latency under load than Flash solid state drive (SSD) or hard disk drive (HDD) solutions, making it ideally suited to a Tier-0 infrastructure.”

Tier-0 storage is used to hold in DRAM or Flash the data of I/O-bound applications. Violin says it maximizes price/performance for large datasets because the appliances are built to be highly scalable and accelerate database and analytic applications “by orders of magnitude compared to disk storage systems,” allowing data centers to replace performance disks or servers, thus saving space, hardware costs, and power.

Violin says the new unit is the industry’s fastest DRAM appliance. It can handle over one million IOPS to one host. A single unit supports 4TB of Flash capacity in a 2U form factor while achieving up to 80 percent reduction in space and power than comparable systems.

Violin integrates hot-swappable RAID, doubling the useable capacity when compared to enterprise SSD units, cutting the cost of enterprise-grade Flash storage in half. Not only is it thrifty in this way, but it’s speedy, too; it’s able to sustain 100,000 random write IPOS (using a 4K block), which is over ten times the performance of Fibre Channel or PCIe SSDs. The company says the 4TB SLC Flash has an estimated life of 10 years, double the industry standard and can replace more than 500 15,000 RPM drives for such applications as Oracle and MySQL. Latency is reduced by up to 95 percent, Violin says, thanks to its RAID technology. Violin’s Flash RAID provides 60 percent additional useable capacity and bandwidth and reduces latency under load.

More information is available at http://www.violin-memory.com