Violin Memory Launches Powerful New Products for CIOs to Build the All-Silicon Data Center

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 27, 2011) - Violin Memory, Inc., provider of the world's fastest and most scalable Memory Arrays, today introduced the Violin 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays, the industry's first all-silicon storage systems with the reliability, performance and economics to be deployed as mission-critical primary storage. The 6000 Series marks a new flash-based vision for the future of enterprise storage and presents compelling competition for decades-old mechanical storage arrays that have long dominated corporate data centers. With 80 percent reduction in cost per input/output operations per second (IOPS) and a 15:1 reduction in physical consolidation of hardware from a disk array vendor, Violin's "Rack in a Box" approach paves the way for CIOs to leverage all-silicon enterprise storage as the foundation for the most data-intensive enterprise environments, including those supporting virtualization, private and public clouds, and Big Data initiatives.

Violin also unveiled the new Violin 3220, doubling the storage capacity of the 3200 Series to 20 terabytes (TB) of SLC per 3U shelf. Together, Violin's 3000 and 6000 Series transforms the industry by addressing all requirements for flash in the data center -- from specialized departmental application acceleration use-cases to business-critical enterprise and primary storage.

"The need for real time access to applications and data is challenging many CIOs and data center managers in data-intensive enterprise environments," said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for solid state storage at IDC. "All-silicon enterprise storage solutions, such as Violin's Memory Arrays, that incorporate highly reliable system-level enterprise design features provide CIOs a new way to accelerate their storage infrastructures."

An all-in-one solution, the 6000 Series provides CIOs a fast lane to the all-silicon data center with Memory Arrays designed from the "ground up" with the high availability that is demanded of strategic data center resources. Unlike others, the 6000 Series introduces a new level of performance density with full enterprise reliability in a 3U SAN attached platform. Violin's unique approach to flash aggregation allowed the design of a completely hot swappable platform that provides sustained and balanced performance to accelerate all business critical applications, allowing them to be virtualized and deployed in private clouds. Deploying Tier 1 Memory Arrays leads to extensive server compression and software license savings. With the ability to house more than 160 TBs in a rack with 10 million IOPS and 40GB/s performance, Violin's Memory Arrays are the foundation for a truly balanced storage layer that ensures the full utilization of compute resources and expensive software licenses.

"The overwhelming response to the Violin 6000 Series from our customers and partners has made it clear that the future of primary storage within the Global 5000 is flash Memory Arrays," said Dr. Donald Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. "We built the 6000 from the ground up, using our own extensive software and hardware intellectual property, to give CIOs the highest reliability, performance, serviceability, space and power compression, and cost savings demanded in enterprise environments. We offer CIOs both the performance and reliability to build a bullet-proof, state-of-the-art, virtualized, silicon data center."

Delivering mission critical availability without compromising performance requires a sophisticated systems approach that tightly integrates hardware and software. Redundant Memory Gateways, which virtualize the flash resources and manage network connectivity, are now integrated in the chassis and remove the need for an external device to connect to the network. All components are redundant and there is no single point of failure in the system as today's CIOs have come to expect. Data on the Violin Integrated Memory Modules (VIMMs) is protected by hardware based flash vRAID. Block or chip failures are handled on-the-fly and in the event of a VIMM failure, data is moved to a spare and the VIMM can be hot-swapped. The combined result is a system that meets the highest mission critical availability standards for enterprise customers.

Violin 6000 models are available based on either Single Level Cell (SLC) or Multi Level Cell (MLC) flash technology. Systems based on SLC are optimized for performance, supporting 16TBs per array and delivering one million RAIDed IOPS. Systems based on MLC are optimized for capacity and support 32TBs per array and deliver 500,000 RAIDed IOPS. Violin's unique vRAID hardware based approach results in the fastest MLC Memory Array on the market. Multiple Memory Arrays can be clustered together scaling to petabytes of storage and tens of millions of IOPS.

Violin 3220 is available now and the new 6000 series Arrays are currently shipping to strategic partners in limited quantities with general availability in Q1.

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About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin's Memory Arrays are changing the data center for companies like AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Oracle, Juniper and HP through its patent-pending flash vRAID technology. The company was recently named AlwaysOn 2011 Company of the Year, a Gartner "Cool Vendor" and a Top Startup to Watch by SearchStorage.com. Furthermore, Violin was honored as one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies by Lead411 and won two SPIFFY awards.

Violin Memory is pioneering the future of Flash memory in the enterprise data center with Memory Arrays that accelerate business critical applications and enable enterprises to virtualize and optimize their IT infrastructures. Specifically designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin's Memory Arrays scale to petabytes and tens of millions of IOPS with low, spike-free latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Violin Memory products, visit www.vmem.com.