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Violin Memory

Violin Memory is pioneering the future of enterprise solid state systems, with flash Memory Arrays that deliver unprecedented sustainability and low spike-free latency for the company seeking to accelerate its business critical applications and to virtualize and optimize their IT infrastructure.
.... Violin Memory logo - click for more info

Specifically designed for extreme sustained performance with high reliability and serviceability, Violin's flash-based appliances scale to tens of terabytes of capacity, millions of IOPs per second, gigabytes per second of bandwidth at low latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information, visit www.vmem.com

see also:- Violin - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and Violin's SSD blog


Who's who in SSD? - by Zsolt Kerekes - November 23, 2011

Violin Memory is listed in various of my enterprise SSD directories including:- the top 20 SSD companies, the fastest SSDs, FC SAN SSDs and iSCSI SSDs.

In the highly competitive market of enterprise SSDs Violin is unusual in being a company which - having launched its first product (in August 2007) - realized it had got things slightly wrong, then went back into stealth mode, restructured its product, changed its management team and financing and then re-emerged a few years later with a better sense of where it was going - and has since lived to tell the tale. It's #2 in the top SSD companies list (Q3 2011).

I wouldn't recommend other companies to try this disjointed route to market - but sometimes that's just the way it happens. And it shows that if your core technology is advanced enough - you may have enough time to to learn from customers what you need to do to re-package the tech in a way that's more relevant to their needs - before anyone else can get ahead of you and steal the market away.

Violin's first systems (in 2007) were enterprise grade PCIe connected solid state memory accelerators. As we know from what happened afterwards - enterprise users are comfortable with the idea of PCIe SSDs so long as they are cards - but when it comes to rackmount SSDs they prefer to stick with traditional network storage connectivity - rather than introduce a new type of storage box.

The core of Violin's technology is a big architecture memory array which enables non blocking reads after flash writes, has full duty cycle garbage collection and delivers "spike-free" sustainable performance.

When I spoke to Violin's CEO - Don Basile recently about this he said that inside their protection array they're actually doing 5x more IOPS than the customer is seeing outside the box and on the datasheet.

Speed is a core dimension of what Violin's 6000 series rackmount SSDs offer. Another is reliability (no single point of failure). But the company's positioning is that it offers very high density, high performance tier 1 storage at a competitive price per terabyte that connects to legacy SANs. If you like what fast SAN SSDs can do for your apps - then this one of the companies which has to be on your shortlist.

I currently talk to more than 300 makers of SSDs and another 100 or so companies which are closely enmeshed around the SSD ecosphere - which are all profiled here on the mouse site.

I learn about new SSD companies every day, including many in stealth mode. If you're interested in the growing big picture of the SSD market canvass - StorageSearch will help you along the way. Many SSD company CEOs read our site too - and say they value our thought leading SSD content - even when we say something that's not always comfortable to hear. I hope you'll find it it useful too.

  • editor's earlier comments:- October 2011 - Violin Memory - was #2 in the top 20 SSD companies list in Q3 2011 (published by StorageSearch.com in October 7, 2011) - the company's highest position since these quarterly search based rankings began - and up 2 positions since the preceding quarter.

    This ranking improvement was already in place - before the company announced details of its new tier 1 SSD storage in September - and affirms my view that when enterprise SSD readers see a product or company they like the sound of they want to learn more.

    When I spoke to Violin's CEO a few weeks ago - the question of the top SSD companies list did arise (as it often does when I talk to SSD companies). At the time I muttered something - like I think you're still doing OK - whereas in fact I had been seeing searches about the company and its products at the top end of my analytics screens for a few months - as well as getting frequent questions about them from VCs and investors.

    Congratulations to Violin on making such a successful come back. (Although there's still a steep hill to climb to the #1 slot - which got 84% more searches than Violin. Violin itself got 9% more than the #3 ranked SSD company.)

    Violin Memory was the 1st company to focus on the very high performance PCIe connected SSD market (in 2007) and has appeared from time to time in the fastest SSDs lists.

    For a few years (2009 and 2010) the company appeared to lose momentum and focus. When I spoke to Violin's CEO Don Basile in November 2010 - I said they looked like a company which had gone back into stealth mode. They are in effect a new company with new funding ($75 million in the 1st half of 2011) but still marketing the same technology base products - which due to their holistic design have very high capacity and performance for their package footprint. Violin says it's on course to reach $100 million revenue this year.

    Where does Violin stand relative to my SSD architecture models?

    They are legacy (rather than new dynasty and big (rather than small) SSD architecture.

    Alternatives to Violin Memory?

    For competing products in this category see the fastest SSDs and rackmount SSD directories.

    Other makers of tier 1 FC SAN SSD storage (with hot replaceable modules) include:- Kaminario - whose product line includes MLC and RAM SSD options - and Huawei Symantec - whose SLC only product line has lower performance but also lower cost.

    Other makers of FC SAN SSDs which, however, require application dependent configuration to support failover configurations include:- Texas Memory Systems and Solid Access Technologies.

    Many other FC SAN SSD systems appear to overlap with Violin's product range - but don't in reality compete for the same application slots. These include auto-tiering SSDs / ASAPs from Dataram and GridIron Systems.

    And yet another category of similar sounding - but functionally different - network SSDs is a class of bulk storage SSDs (with internal compression and dedupe) from companies like Nimble Storage and WhipTail Technologies.
Violin - recent milestones from SSD market history

In August 2007 - Violin Memory launched the world's fastest 2U SSD - the Violin 1010.

In August 2008 - Violin Memory said it had delivered 1 million IOPS on a single interface port (a world record) using the latest version of its RAM based Violin 1010 memory appliance.

In November 2008 - Violin Memory announced availability of a new model - a fast 4TB SLC flash SSD in a 2U rackmount. Its patent pending non blocking architecture delivers the best ratio of flash R/W IOPS in the industry - over 200K random Read IOPS and 100K random Write IOPS (4K block). Interface options include:- PCIe, Fibre Channel and Ethernet.

In September 2009 - Violin Memory announced that Donald Basile has been named CEO. Dr. Basile (with over 20 years of leadership experience) had recently served as the CEO of Fusion-io.

In March 2010 - FalconStor announced technical and VAR channel support for Violin Memory's 2U rackmount FC flash SSD - the Violin 1010 . Although the headline specs of this very fast flash SSD are substantially the same as when it was launched in November 2008 the 2 important things which have changed are:-
  • the availability of SSD ASAP-like features implemented by FalconStor's SafeCache and HotZone software.
In April 2010 - Violin Memory announced it had received a significant investment from Toshiba.

In May 2010 - Violin Memory announced a strategic partnership with Landmark Ventures a technology-focused strategic advisory and investment-banking firm. No details were given but there have been several signs in the past year that Violin is restructuring itself to better cope with the competitive and growth demands of the rackmount SSD market. For example - earlier in this month Violin announced the appointment of former Cisco VP Larry Lang to its board.

In June 2010 - Violin Memory announced it has acquired the technology assets of of Gear6.

In September 2010 - Violin Memory announced availability of the Violin 3140 - a 3U MLC SSD with 40TB capacity priced at under $16 per GB and $3 per IOPS.

In November 2010 - Violin Memory (which makes rackmount SSDs) unveiled a multi-terabyte SSD cache solution for NAS systems which use NFS. Violin says its vCACHE expands to 15TB of useable cache and delivers over 300,000 NFS operations per second over 8x 10GbE ports.

Editor's comments:- I spoke to Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory, and Matt Barletta a few days ago to get a current view of how the company sees itself, competitors and the SSD market. ...click here to read the interview

In January 2011 - Violin Memory re-entered the top 10 in the 15th quarterly edition of the Top SSD companies.

In February 2011 - Violin Memory announced a $35 Million Series B funding round which includes Toshiba - a strategic investor since April 2010.

In June 2011 - Violin Memory announced a $40 Million Series C funding round.

In July 2011 - Violin Memory anoounced it had been named "company of the year" by AlwaysOn.

In September 2011 - Violin Memory announced new models and options in its range of fast iSCSI / FC SAN rackmount SSDs. The new 6000 series - designed for high availability applications with no single point of failure and hot swappable "everything" - provides 12TB SLC, or 22TB MLC usable capacity with 200/600 microseconds mixed latency, 1 million / 500K sustained RAIDed spike free write IOPS, in 3U rackspace at a list price around $37K / $20K per terabyte.

In October 2011 - Violin Memory achieved its highest ever ranking in StorageSearch.com's 18th quarterly list of the Top SSD Companies. Violin was #2 - based on search volume which tracked over 350,000 online SSD readers in the 3rd quarter of 2011.
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World's 1st PCIe rackmount SSD
In August 2007 - Violin launched the world's fastest 2U SSD.

This was the 1st time that a PCIe connected rackmount SSD had been featured on StorageSearch.com.

Earlier SSDs with a claim to ultra speed fame had included FC, SAS or InfiniBand interfaces.

There were 2 things which stood out when this product was launched.

1 - the high density (compared to other RAM SSD products), and

2 - Violin's promise to follow up with a later flash SSD model with the same interface and form factor. That promise was made good in November 2008 - when the company announced a 4TB SLC flash 2U model with over 200K random Read IOPS and 100K random Write IOPS (4K blocks).
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Editor's notes from SSD market history.

The product shown below - from Violin Memory - was
the most popular SSD product featured here on
StorageSearch.com in the 4th quarter of 2008.
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Violin 1010 - world's densest  DRAM  array -  for  HPC and data center server acceleration
world's fastest 2U flash / RAM SSD
from Violin Memory

storage search banner

tier 1 - 1U rackmount SSD
no single point of failure
lowest latency, highest density 1U FC SLC SSD
the RamSan-720 - from Texas Memory Systems
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"... if Fusion-io sells more...
does that mean Violin will sell less?"
That's a question asked recently by a reader.
...click to read my (article length) reply
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SSD ad - click for more info
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Violin video re advantages of home grown controllers
Editor:- January 23, 2012 - I commented recently that the top 10 SSD companies in Q4 2011 all had one thing in common (apart from the fact they make SSDs) - they all had their own proprietary SSD controller architecture which they could use to optimize products for some application markets (even if some of them also used other controllers too).

In a recent video - Violin's, CTO Software Jonathan Goldick talks about the benefits they get from having their own controller.

click to  see the SSD video I like it because it also echoes themes I discussed last year in my big versus small SSD architecture article - and also because it's short - less than 250 seconds. ...watch Violin's SSD video
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Violin unveils naked cost advantages in reliable SSD arrays
Editor:- September 27, 2011 - Violin Memory today announced new models and options in its range of fast iSCSI / FC SAN rackmount SSDs.

The new 6000 series - designed for high availability applications with no single point of failure and hot swappable "everything" - provides 12TB SLC, or 22TB MLC usable capacity with 200/600 microseconds mixed latency, 1 million / 500K sustained RAIDed spike free write IOPS, in 3U rackspace at a list price around $37K / $20K per terabyte.

For less demanding applications (but still featuring hot swap memory modules) the company has also extended its lower priced 3000 series to 16TB SLC usable capacity.

Editor's comments:- when I spoke to Violin's CEO - Don Basile about the new 6000 series he was curious about how I would tell you what's unique about this product and signal whether it's relevant to you or not.

I said - when it comes to reliability - you've either got it - or you haven't - and there aren't too many enterprise SSD systems which have hot-swap everything. That's one of the reasons the latency looks slow - compared to many other fast SSDs - because the figures quoted here include the latency of the internal factory built protection schemes.

Another angle - I said is your product is an example of "big SSD architecture". When I explained what I meant - Don agreed and said what it means for the customer is lower price. Because when you look at the raw capacity that's lost to over-provisioning and RAID like protection and get down to the usable capacity that the customer sees in an MLC rack - say - then Violin's 6000 delivers about 70% of the raw capacity - versus nearer to 30% in an array of 2.5" SSDs for example. That confers a 2 to 1 native cost and density (SSD TB/U) advantage.

I said Violin's density looks good too - compared say to Kaminario's K2.

I also said - that our SSD readers would recognize what was meant by "spike-free" IOPS - because of various past articles about this - and because another enterprise flash vendor - Virident Systems - had made that one of the differences they talk about compared to some other flash PCIe SSD companies. I knew that in Violin's case that was due to their patented non-blocking write architecture - which was explained to me when their first flash products came to market in 2008.

Don said - that inside their protection array they're actually doing 5x more IOPS than the customer is seeing outside the box and on the datasheet - and that helps too.

I also asked about price - and where they were relative to $30K / TB - which is the ballpark for this type of product - and you can see where Violin are above. That's a competitive figure for a no SPOF SSD.

I said that for people who are serious about enterprise SSDs it's relatively easy to decide what products you may want to focus in on after just seeing a couple of simple metrics.

Don did also mention a comparative write up - about their SSD versus another so called "tier 1" storage solution - from EMC. Violin think it makes them look pretty good - but I can't understand why anyone cares how they stack up to EMC - who never understood the SSD plot - which is why their (at one time) prime SSD supplier STEC has had a bumpy revenue stream in recent years.

I had one final question for Don - which wasn't about Violin's new SSD - but about something which had come to my attention while I was googling the company just before our conversation.
click to see the collection of  SSD reliability articles here on StorageSearch.com When can we expect to see a picture of a naked man featured on a Vmem poster ad? - I asked.

He laughed and indicated it wouldn't be anytime soon.

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SSD ad - click for more info

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an off the wall advertising strategy for enterprise SSDs
Most of the SSD industry thought leaders I speak to are agreed about one thing - even though they may disagree about almost everything else - and that's the need to improve industry-wide understanding about the architecture and technical issues related to getting the best results from enterprise SSDs. Without a better level of SSD education - user adoption won't grow as fast as it could - because if users can't rationally compare different options they are being offered - they won't understand the risks and benefits and will proceed more cautiously.

Imangine my surprise then at seeing an article in Businessweek (September 2011) which shows that Violin Memory has been using sem-naked women protrayed on posters in airports as the way it's going to invest in getting more mindshare and attention in the market of enterprise decision makers. This demonstrates to me that the company feels ithas money it can afford to burn and doesn't care too much about offending some people.

If you're an investor in Violin then it means that instead of educating customers your funds are being siphoned into poster art and graphics design. If you're a potential customer - you will come away with the impression that the product would cost you a lot less if you weren't funding this null content branding scheme for their graphics design and ad agency. My view is - that Violin's competitors will be the biggest winners from this activity - because any company which wastes resources in such marketing activities and directly alienates potential customers with a soft porn pitch for an enterprise SSD product deserves a reality check- no matter how good its underlying technology.
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the Problem with Write IOPS in flash SSDs
the "play it again Sam" syndrome

Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the fastest SSDs.

So why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?

And why are users still buying RAM SSDs which cost an order of magnitude more than SLC? (let alone MLC) - even when the IOPS specs look similar.
the problem with flash SSD  write IOPS This article tells you why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely differently. ...read the article
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