Violin 6000 Flash RAIDs: 3U, 12TB or 22TB, 1,000,000 IO/s

Violin Memory, Inc. introduced the 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays, an all-silicon storage systems with the reliability, performance and economics to be deployed as mission-critical primary storage.

            6000 Series

The 6000 Series marks a new flash-based vision for enterprise storage and presents competition for decades-old mechanical storage arrays that have long dominated corporate data centers. With 80 percent reduction in cost per 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 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 20TB per 3U shelf. Together, Violin’s 3000 and 6000 Series address 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 high 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 availability that is demanded of strategic data center resources. Unlike others, the 6000 Series introduces performance density with enterprise reliability in a 3U SAN attached platform. Violin’s approach to flash aggregation allowed the design of a 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 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 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 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. 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.

Violin 6000 models are available based on either SLC or 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 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 and the 6000 series Arrays are  shipping to strategic partners in limited quantities with general availability in Q1.