Violin Releases 4TB Flash Appliance

November 13, 2008: Scalable memory appliance provider Violin Memory has announced the availability of SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND Flash Modules for its Violin 1010 Memory Appliance, enabling support of input/output operations that are many times faster than that offered by traditional hard drives.

The company says that its new solid state disk (SSD) solution has been developed for Tier-0 infrastructure that holds the live data of I/O bound applications. It claims that it can provide unprecedented price/performance to large datasets with its tailored and highly scalable appliances.

Violin claims that its SSD technology can acclerate database, analytics, messaging and metadata storage by orders of magnitude compared to disk storage systems, while also cutting costs via power savings.

The Violin 1010, which the company claims is the industry’s fastest DRAM appliance, supports over 1 Million IOPS to a single host, and supports 4TB of Flash capacity in a 2U appliance. It consumes 80 percent less space and power than similar systems, and according to Violin it lowers the total cost of enterprise-grade Flash storage by more than 50 percent.

“Flash in a memory appliance offers a radical new form factor as compared to the traditional hard disk look-a-like implementations of SSDs,” says Gene Ruth, Storage Analyst at The Burton Group. “The memory appliance form factor allows companies to have highly scalable, high performing, and extremely power efficient flash memory storage systems.”

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