4TB SLC Flash Appliance Revealed by Violin Memory

Violin Memory, Inc., provider of  memory appliances, announced the availability of SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND Flash Modules for its Violin 1010 Memory Appliance. Violin’s Flash technology supports an order of magnitude more Input/Output operations Per Second (IOPS) and significantly lower latency under load than Flash Solid State Drive (SSD) or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) solutions, making it ideally suited to a Tier-Ø infrastructure.

Tier-Ø storage holds the live data of I/O bound applications in DRAM or Flash. Violin brings unprecedented price/performance to large datasets through purpose-built and highly scalable memory appliances. Database, analytics, messaging and metadata storage are accelerated by orders of magnitude compared to disk storage systems. Racks of performance disks or servers can be replaced with shelves of Violin memory appliances resulting in significant cost and power savings.

The Violin 1010, also the industry’s fastest DRAM appliance, supports over 1 Million IOPS to a single host, dramatically accelerating database applications. With SLC NAND Flash, the Violin 1010 significantly improves the economics and performance metrics of Flash storage systems for the data center:

• Density and Power Efficiency: A single Violin 1010 supports 4TB of Flash capacity in a 2U appliance. It consumes 80% less space and power than similar systems.
• Cost per Useable GByte: In addition to significantly increasing density, Violin integrates hot-swappable RAID and doubles the useable capacity compared with enterprise SSD solutions. The total cost of enterprise-grade Flash storage is lowered by more than 50%.
• Write IOPS: Violin’s Flash technology enables over 100K sustained random Write IOPS (4K block), more than ten times greater than Fiber Channel or PCIe SSDs.
• Latency:  Violin’s RAID dramatically reduces latency under load by more than 80%, eliminating the multi-millisecond variability seen in current SSDs.
• Wear: The Violin 1010 with 4TB SLC Flash can sustain continuous 100K Write IOPS over its projected 10 year life, double the industry standard.  Unlike SSDs, all workloads are supported without wear being a concern to the end-user.

“Flash in a memory appliance offers a radical new form factor as compared to the traditional hard disk look-a-like implementations of SSDs,” said 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. A flash memory appliance serves especially well as the foundation of a dedicated Tier-Ø infrastructure.”

The Violin 1010 supports 4TB of SLC Flash capacity and can substitute for more than 500 15K rpm drives for applications including Oracle, MySQL and Objectivity databases. It delivers over 100K Write IOPS and 200K Read IOPS (4K block). The cost and power per operation of the Violin 1010 is 80% lower than performance disk solutions and its 95% lower latency dramatically improves the response times of individual queries.

Violin’s patent-pending Flash RAID technology, designed specifically to enhance NAND Flash system performance, provides full RAID data protection and a fundamentally more efficient and higher performance solution. Existing RAID 5 & 6 solutions rely on Read-Modify-Write operations that are unsuited to Flash. Unlike inefficient RAID 1 solutions, Violin’s Flash RAID enables 60% more useable capacity and bandwidth. Violin’s Flash RAID also reduces latency under load by hundreds of microseconds through Flash-specific scheduling of operations. Notably, the 70 microsecond latency of the Violin 1010 is 80% lower than Tier-1 storage cache (DRAM) and significantly improves metrics such as File Read & Write times, response time and query time.

Delivering the extremely low Flash latency enables applications, such as memcached, that previously required many servers with large DRAM footprints. The Violin 1010 with Flash reduces the space, power and total cost by 75% over standard servers without a significant increase in response time.

 “Flash will be a major solution to lowering the cost of Internet-scale applications and reducing power requirements of the data center,” said Donpaul Stephens, Founder and President of Violin. “We are delighted with the interest being shown by NASDAQ 100 companies in our Flash products and technology.”

The Violin 1010 with SLC NAND Flash provides the industry’s leading performance at a significantly lower total cost. Flash storage with RAID protection, enclosure, and server interconnect is less than $50 per GByte, over 75% savings compared with Tier-1 storage systems, Enterprise SSDs and RAID. System capacities range from 320 GBytes to 4 TBytes within a single appliance. Fibre Channel and Ethernet network attachments are supported via a network head and direct attachment through a low latency PCI Express (PCIe) connection.

Operating systems supported via an open source PCIe driver include:

• Major Linux releases and distributions
• Windows 32 and 64-bit Operating Systems
• OpenSolaris