Santa Clara, Calif.-based Violin Memory, a provider of flash data storage systems and components, today unveiled a new array, the 7000.
Available now, the all-flash system is powered by Concerto, the company’s storage software platform. Eric Herzog, Violin’s chief marketing officer, told InfoStor that the hardware and software combo provides “comprehensive data services,” including data protection, business continuity and storage optimization.
Concerto is another step in the company’s journey of becoming a one-stop provider of enterprise storage systems, said Herzog. The systems represent a critical piece of a portfolio comprised of “full storage solutions of hardware and software [that are] tightly integrated.”
The launch follows the September 2013 release of Maestro, a software-based solution meant to ease flash storage migration challenges for enterprises. Residing on the company’s Violin Memory Appliances, Maestro allows organizations to non-disruptively introduce SSD arrays into their existing storage area networks (SANs).
Concerto 7000 arrays are based on the company’s Violin Intelligent Memory Modules (VIMMs). The boards, which resemble supersized DIMM modules, are each packed with NAND flash chips, their own management processor and an allotment of DRAM for accelerated metadata processing.
“We do not use SSDs,” reminded Herzog. It’s a strategy that eliminates hotspots, an issue that crops up in architectures that are dependent on discrete SSDs.
Violin’s 7000 array can be outfitted with 24 to 64 VIMMs. In total, a 3U system can house 70 TB of raw flash capacity and deliver sustained performance of over 500,000 IOPs at 500 microseconds for snappy data center and cloud applications, according to the company.
The 7000 can scale to 280 TB of capacity in 18U footprint. “Everything is hot-swap and fully redundant,” said Herzog.
Built-in storage management features include thin provisioning, virtual machine thin clones and “app consistent, writable” snapshots. Concerto supports synchronous and remote asynchronous replication, zero recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for stretch clusters, automated disaster recovery management and WAN optimized replication.
Violin’s platform also provides continuous data protection services, transparent LUN mirroring and integrates with popular backup applications. In-flight encryption support keeps sensitive data under wraps.
Customers with 6000 arrays aren’t left out in the cold, said Herzog. Violin is offering an upgrade kit that essentially turns the 6000 into a Concerto system.
Concerto 7000 arrives just as enterprise storage market is entering a critical tipping point, said Herzog. Disk may still cost less relative to flash, but “cost per GB doesn’t tell the whole story,” he asserted.
Flash for tier 1 and tier 2 workloads is the economical buy when organizations take into account the performance and storage management benefits, argued Herzog. “We not only optimize their storage, but optimize the entire data center.”
