Violin Memory Splashes The Flash, Announces Two New Arrays

California-based storage player Violin Memory has taken the lid off its new Flash Storage Platform, calling it the first all-flash storage system designed to run all primary storage.

The Flash Storage Platform (FSP) consists of the 7300 and 7700 flash arrays, along with Concerto OS 7, and Symphony 3 simple management control.

Violin is calling the pricing of the platform ‘transformative’, and said in a press release that the FSP “achieves the ultimate consolidation and simplification of next generation data centre workloads by delivering the highest performance storage at the lowest CAPEX and OPEX possible today”.

Reenergise

Violin Memory had its IPO in 2013, but has had a tough time with shares since then. The new product announcements are here to reenergise the company in the flash market. The 7300 has already been on the market for a number of years, but now comes with an extended list of new features, while the 7700 is completely new in 2015.

Most other flash storage vendors are selling their solutions built with SSDs, but Violin sees this as a less flexible option. By using raw, all-flash, converged products, Violin is betting on its differentiators to claw back the market.

“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,” said Kevin DeNuccio, CEO at Violin Memory.

“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 centre by legacy disk.”

Concerto OS 7

At the heart of the FSP is Concerto OS 7. The operating system combines recovery, data management, flash management and control and other tools to one plane of government. Concerto OS 7 is managed by the user through Symphony 3, offering granular control on a per workload, application or LUN level of all features.

The 7300 and 7700 Flash Storage Platform designs reduce the effective cost-per-gigabyte by more than 75 percent over Violin’s prior generation of arrays, and are more than 25 percent lower in cost-per-gigabyte than the competition, claims Violin.

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