The cost barrier to adopting flash memory may be on its way down with storage vendor Violin Memory announcing new platforms today that offer the medium at what the company says to be the price of traditional storage.
The company, based in Santa Clara, Calif. said that it also went back to the drawing board for its Concerto OS 7, which will this time integrate management tools under Symphony 3, app consistent snapshots, continuous data protection, replication, and granular data reduction as opposed to having separate tools for each function.
“With the Concerto operating system, we made mistakes,” said Erik Ottem, director of product marketing at Violin Memory. “The different pieces that we used to have to deal with have now been brought under one umbrella; one pane of glass.”
Specific hardware products it unveiled today include the 7300 and 7700 Flash Storage Platforms, two all-flash arrays designed to replace traditional storage for active data.
With the firmware and OS enhancements, Ottem said that Violin’s feature set will be the same as the “big boys,” and will namely include enterprise features offered by EMC and IBM.
The difference here, however, is in cost.
“Because we build that vertical integration from the chip up, it gives us cost control over the price,” said Ottem, adding that the cost would be at the same level as legacy storage or lower.
He explained that the solutions were targeted at a broad range of applications including top-tier customers and that it was a different game to go after primary storage.
The 7300 is a standalone unit that offers up to 70TB raw and 217TB effective capacity whereas the 7700 is a modular scale‐up solution that can reach up to 1.3PB effective capacity by slotting in any combination of 6000 or 7300 units in up to 6 storage shelves.
Additional features include storage usage analysis among different departments in a company, file-level control as well as significant power and physical footprint reductions.
“Our products requires less OS, apps and hardware, and resellers will see it’s much more efficient,” said Ottem. “All active data belongs on flash. It’s going to happen.”
