Violin Expands Alliance With Toshiba

Violin Memory, Inc. announced a planned alliance with Toshiba Corp. to leverage one another’s IP in NAND flash to deliver a new family of third-generation, server-based PCIe cards.

The alliance between Toshiba, inventor of NAND flash, and Violin Memory allows for mass adoption of an economic memory-based IT infrastructure.

"The PCIe card market is important to Toshiba’s customers," said Hiroyuki Sato, VP of storage products division, Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor & Storage Products Company. "Expanding our strategic relationship with Violin Memory will allow us to bring the valuable Violin enterprise IP to a broad range industry leading solutions in our future product offerings."
 
The world is moving towards a transaction oriented ecosystem which requires a new approach to delivering IT value at the speed of memory. Violin is shifting data center economics at the server layer and the shared storage layer. In collaboration with Toshiba, Violin now offers a line of memory-based storage solutions from memory-based arrays to PCIe cards. The Toshiba alliance enables Violin to have visibility and control of the supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and R&D efforts at the foundry, chip and software layers.

"From smartphone and tablet, to server and the core of the enterprise data center and the cloud, the mobile world drives the need for memory-based architectures," said Hiroyuki Sato of Toshiba.
 
Enterprise customers want an IT supplier that has visibility, control and expertise to deliver on its promises. With the Toshiba alliance, Violin streamlines the supply chain required to handle the demanding enterprise IT environments and offer customers predictable performance. Unlike other flash storage solution providers, Violin does not have to work through multiple layers of aggregation and margin ‘add on’ before the final product reaches a customer.

Third Generation PCIe Cards
With Price/Performance Economics
Violin’s Velocity PCIe card family allows customers to solve a variety of application workload needs, while offering economics, enterprise reliability, sustainability and predictable performance. Because the cards use a lightweight driver, expensive host CPU and DRAM resources are not required. As a result, application performance is not compromised.

The Velocity family includes:

• 1.37TB to 11TB of capacity (per card) ranging from $3/GB to $6/GB list price
• Form factors that range from low profile to full height and full length

These combinations offer low price to the highest capacities on a per card basis.
 
"Our new focus on PCIe cards will allow both companies to drive radical new economics that lead to the mass adoption of memory-based architectures," said Don Basile, CEO of Violin. "NAND memory is now a requirement at every level from the smart connected device to the core of the cloud and the enterprise data center. Violin’s combined product portfolios continue our leadership across the evolving memory-based solution market."
 
According to Jeff Janukowicz, research director for solid state storage and enabling technologies at IDC, "Solid state storage is on a path to become more pervasive across the enterprise and deliver the real-time data access and performance that customers require. Violin should be positioned to bring additional value to the solid state storage market based on the company’s system portfolio, the strategic alliance with Toshiba, and the new family of server-based PCIe cards."

With the Velocity family and Violin’s third generation memory-based arrays, the company now offers a portfolio of memory-based storage solutions to address the needs of a variety of application workloads.

The Memory Velocity cards can be ordered now.