From Violin Memory, FSP 7600 and FSP 7250 Flash Storage Systems

Violin Memory, Inc. announced the addition of the FSP 7600 and the FSP 7250 to its Flash Storage Platform (FSP) 7000 series.

As enterprise customers continue to experience a range of performance and capacity demands to cope with the challenges of diverse enterprise workloads, company’s FSP all-flash storage arrays address these challenges. The FSP 7600, a high-density array is designed to deliver performance to address the high end of the all-flash array market, and the FSP 7250, is optimized with always on data reduction to provide an entry level point – below $100,000 – into all-flash storage.

With the FSP 7600, the company demonstrates high-performance arrays, offering low latency and high I/O density, while setting a new industry bar for storage consolidation by delivering 140TB of raw flash in three rack units. The FSP 7600 delivers 1.1 million IO/s under 500-microsecond latency, reducing the latency by half, as compared to current all flash arrays in the market, while simultaneously driving up its high I/O density. This allows customers to consolidate mixed and multiple workloads in the lowest footprint possible, outclassing all competitive products. With the FSP 7250, Violin makes it easier for customers to transition to flash with a lower entry price with the flexibility to scale in performance or capacity as their data center needs grow.

“Customers are struggling with the continual increase of enterprise applications and resulting workloads that demand a wide range of performance requirements,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research. “Customers approach 451 seeking guidance for all flash arrays available in the market that offer a range of performance from 100,000 to 1 million IO/s. With that wide range of demands, the cost to deliver the right level of performance for any workload is quickly coming into the spotlight. Violin’s announcement today means customers will have a set of options to address these performance and capacity demands without compromising the flexibility to have an enterprise storage platform.”

The FSP 7600 and FSP 7250 are an extension of the Flash Storage Platform 7000 series that addresses the needs of primary storage. The FSP series includes the existing FSP 7300, which offers up to 217TB of effective capacity in three rack units, and the FSP 7700, a highly scalable, high-performance scale-up platform. With the addition of the FSP 7600 to the platform, customers will gain unparalleled performance and capacity scale – 2.2 million IO/s with less than one millisecond latency, and capacity scale up to 1.4PB of raw flash capacity in a single name space. The FSP 7000 platform series comes with industry-leading enterprise services such as asynchronous replication, synchronous mirroring, stretch clustering with zero RPO and zero RTO, snapshots, clones, and other services.

The FSP 7600 is available with between 35TB and 140TB raw capacity, and the FSP 7250 is available with capacity starting as low as 8TB of raw capacity. Both arrays, as with other FSP arrays, are offered with company’s flexible ‘Pay As You Grow’ capacity-based pricing model, which allows customers to align their storage investment with capacity as it is consumed without committing to future usage.

The program provides two primary benefits:

• Customers can upgrade effective capacity nearly instantaneously and at any time through a simple process

• Activating new capacity is entirely non-disruptive, requiring no downtime and no interruption of daily operations.

Addressing storage challenges across markets
“As the pioneer in all flash arrays, Violin recognized that customers need flexibility and simplicity to transform both the performance of their applications, and the cost of their data center storage,” said Kevin DeNuccio, CEO, Violin Memory. “Today, our Flash Storage Platform extends its lead to deploy a single platform architecture and OS for all workloads or use cases. Violin’s newest additions to the FSP series address key all-flash growth segments with varied solutions and options in extreme performance, primary storage and capacity optimization.”

“As enterprises get increasingly sophisticated in pinpointing the specific storage and restore capabilities needed for their varying workloads, one thing is abundantly clear: vendors must orient their solution sets to specifically address a range of use cases,” said Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Furthermore, they should define a range of typical use cases and workload mixes that are common across multiple businesses and market segments. Because flash storage is effectively approaching – indeed sometimes already beating – the cost of disk storage, CIOs and CFOs will expect to see enterprise all-flash arrays with more attractive entry price points. That’s why the announcement of Violin’s portfolio expansion, which includes its sub-$100,000 7250 FSP, has the potential to expand the market opportunity for enterprise flash storage systems.”

Both the FSP 7250 and the FSP 7600 will be generally available in December 2015.