Availability of Violin De-dupe and Compression

Violin Memory, Inc. announced worldwide availability of its data deduplication and compression capabilities on the Concerto 2200 solution.

This announcement extends the company’s set of enterprise data services for all-flash array solutions with data reduction capabilities.

Inline deduplication and compression on the Concerto 2200 solution gives customers storage efficiency, with deduplication rates commonly between 6:1 and 10:1. Delivering up to 672TB of usable storage at a data reduction rate of 6:1, the Concerto 2200 solution is focused on mixed and multiple workload environments and gives customers granular control at the file, share, and share group level.

“Granular, inline deduplication and compression are powerful tools for customers to maximize storage efficiency while optimizing performance at the application level,” said Eric Herzog, CMO and SVP alliances, Violin. “We see competitors who offer ‘always on’ deduplication and compression, but we know that, depending on the customers’ workloads, performance may suffer as a result of the ‘always on’ approach.”

The Concerto 2200 solution delivers granular inline deduplication and compression with NFS ingest capabilities and is initially targeted at Virtual Desktop (VDI) and Virtual Server (VSI) infrastructure.

“Violin Memory’s new Concerto 2200 array update with inline deduplication capabilities bring value to customers with performance and capacity improvements for workload demands. Combining the tier one all-flash array performance with features for scalable virtualization implementations, Violin has a solution for enterprises to improve their economics,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist, Evaluator Group.

The Concerto 2200 dashboard provides critical information on data reduction rates so that customers can see the effective rate of deduplication on their workload and use that information to remove the shares from deduplication, or add additional similar workloads that will benefit from data reduction.

The Concerto 2200 solution consists of two HA appliances that deduplicate and compress shares, share groups or files from NFS and write the data to LUNs on either a Violin 6000 or 7000 series all flash array. The LUNs being serviced can all be on one array, or scaled across up to four arrays, depending on customer requirements. With 6:1 data reduction, the Concerto 2200 solution is capable of storing 672TB of data or enough data for 2,500 persistent desktops in a VDI deployment at a street cost of approximately $1.81/GB or $75/desktop.

Violin data reduction services for NFS environments on the Concerto 2200 solution are available. Deduplication and compression for block storage are expected to follow in early 2015.

Concerto 2200 solution, pay-as-you-grow 6100 and 6200 offerings,
and Windows flash array solutions will be featured at

• VMworld USA 2014, being held August 24 – 27 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.
• Oracle OpenWorld, being held September 28 – October 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.
• VMworld Barcelona, being held October 13 – 17 at the Fira Barcelona Gran Via, Barcelona, Spain

“Vendors and users alike are realizing that the long term value of, and opportunity for, All flash arrays is as an integrated IT technology with high functionality, rather than as an independent point-product offering speed alone. While Violin’s early – albeit strikingly successful – history focused almost exclusively on ultra-performance, the company is to be commended for its recent comprehensive Concerto release, which is already being enhanced now with inline deduplication for VDI and virtual servers on NSF. Combining such growing functionality with its proven performance, large and happy customer base, and a new management team and energy, shows Violin to have all the right ingredients to compete strongly in the contemporary all flash array market,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, ESG.

“Data reduction technologies like compression and deduplication are critical in improving the overall TCO of flash-based arrays. Certain application workloads benefit much more from compression, while others benefit much more from deduplication. For maximum effectiveness, these capabilities need to be implemented inline without unduly impacting application performance and vendors need to offer both,” said Eric Burgener, flash storage research director, IDC.

“Forward-thinking CIOs use flash to lower their costs, but there are still many who hesitate to try the technology. Many argue that they can’t afford the huge gap between flash and HDD price per gigabyte, but they lose sight of the fact that the system’s capital and operating costs both dramatically drop once flash is applied. In the end, the argument boils down to how much the CIO is willing to spend to avoid using flash,” said Jim Handy, director, Objective Analysis.

“Violin has taken the traditional enterprise storage services and has gone beyond to extend this tradition to flash storage. The Concerto 2200 is exactly what the storage industry has been lacking to accelerate the adoption of flash memory in the enterprise – dedupe and compression on the highest performing AFA on the market,” said Jon Toigo, managing principal partner, Toigo Partners International.

“Violin Memory has always been known for its ground-up designed hardware. With the introduction of the Concerto 2200, Violin is not only providing the software capabilities demanded in today’s data centers, but is doing so on a granular level, to give customers greater control. By allowing dedupe and compression to be turned on or off to suit different workloads, Violin has introduced an unusual level of value,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Group.

“With so many options in the market, IT departments need to consider the overall business impact of the storage solution. The Concerto 2200 with inline deduplication and compression elevates further the economic value and performance established with Violin Memory’s all-flash product suite,” said Greg Wong, founder, principal analyst, Forward Insights.

“Violin Memory’s Concerto 2200 data reduction appliance is music to IT’s ears in showing IT how to gain control of its virtualization environments – namely virtual desktop and virtual server infrastructures – at low cost,” said David Hill, principal, Mesabi Group.

“By offering inline duplication and compression in the Violin Memory Concerto 2200 array update and supporting scalable VDI implementations, the company is providing an attractive value in an all-flash array,” said Tom Coughlin, founder, Coughlin Associates.

“The data reduction solution from Violin Memory addresses a customer challenge – storage costs associated with virtualization. The specific fears that our clients are interested in is having granular control based on their specific application needs, which delivers the flexibility to turn deduplication or compression on/off by file or shared drive,” said Rui Moura, infrastructure services, principal, NOESIS, Portugal.