$20 Million+ Funding for Start-Up Violin in SSD Arrays

Violin Memory, Inc., in Flash Memory enterprise systems, announced that Toshiba Corporation, the inventor and technical leader of NAND flash, has made a significant investment in Violin Memory.

Violin’s patent-pending, system-level aggregation technology will harness Toshiba’s NAND flash chips to deliver enterprise class scale, reliability and serviceability. Violin’s innovative solutions are integrated and tested with leading system and application software to provide a complete solution to its customers. Enterprises demand system level solutions and Violin Memory delivers easy integration; lower costs, scaling to large multi-terabyte deployments and dramatic improvement in the performance of business critical applications.

“Toshiba is the most experienced NAND flash supplier with a proven legacy of innovation,” said Mr. Scott Nelson, Vice President, Memory Business Unit at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. “We believe our leading edge technology will enable Violin Memory’s flash Memory Arrays in the performance-driven enterprise data centers.”

Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory said: “The addition of capital and access to Toshiba’s technology and strategic supply adds the final critical component to allow us to provide large quantities of our Memory Arrays to OEMs, end customers, distribution and solution partners, including our recently announced global FalconStor relationship.”

Comments

Violin Memory received over $10 million for its first round in 2007, and now more than $20 million, Toshiba leading this financial operation and becoming the biggest investor in the start-up (Samsung is also probably a smaller one).

Violin will be in a good position to get NAND chips from big flash manufacturer Toshiba. And, on the other side, the Japanese company could have an opportunity to complement its own HDD manufacturing activity.

Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Violin was founded in 2005 by current CTO Jon Bennett and chief strategic officer Donpaul Stephens. This latter, met at CeBIT on FalconStor's booth, explains us that the name Violin was chosen because he loves - but doesn't play - this musical instrument.

Big change at Violin was the arrival in September 2009 of Don Basile as CEO, who was formerly CEO of Fusion-io. Coming from the same company are Matt Barletta, VP of product marketing, and Dixon R. Doll, Jr., COO, as well as storage veteran E. Casey Roche III, VP of business development, that worked for Conner Peripherals (then acquired by Seagate in 1996).

With around 40 employees, Violin is not in SSDs but in disk arrays built on flash drives with patents pending. There is an important difficulty to build RAID with flash chips, compared with HDDs: after several writing, some of the NAND memories cannot be used anymore. For example if you have a RAID-5, you have to manage the impossibility to write in parallel on several blocks if one of them is dead. That's why Violin has developed a special controller with patented algorithms - Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology - to solve this problem. Up to now, the Californian firm is using SLC, MLC coming later this year, said Stepehns

FalconStor has recently decided to resell a PCIe SSD array up to 4TB from Violin to accelerate SAN performance for mission-critical applications. FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator - or Violin 1010 - is available in North America for $32,000, which includes one solid-state memory array with 500GB of RAID-protected storage capacity, the solution being available through FalconStor's channel partners.