Violin Memory’s DRAM Appliance Delivers One Million I/Os per Second to a Server

Violin Memory, Inc., a provider of memory appliances, announced the company has successfully tested its Violin 1010 memory appliance delivering 1 Million IOPS to a server over a single interface, an industry first.

"To put this in perspective, 1 Million IOPS with RAID would take approximately 10,000 Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) or 500 Enterprise-grade Flash Solid State Drives (SSDs)," said Donpaul Stephens, Founder & President of Violin Memory. "The use of Violin memory appliances can completely remove the I/O bottlenecks of data centric applications and significantly improve CPU and power efficiency."

The Violin 1010 Memory Appliance platform supports 3 Million IOPS. Release 1.3 of the Violin 1010, supported 500K IOPS via PCIex8 to a server with the operating system and driver being the major limit.

This release has been successfully trialed with:

• Major Linux releases and distributions
• Windows 32 and 64-bit Operating Systems
• OpenSolaris

   
Release 2.0 of the Violin 1010 improves the I/O efficiency of the OS and allows hundreds of outstanding requests to the memory appliance. This technology enables 1 Million IOPS with DRAM and will also enable over 100K sustained random write IOPS with flash memory. All performance numbers include Violin’s RAID capabilities for maximum reliability. Violin Memory will be accepting orders for Release 2.0 in September.

The Violin 1010 appliance is being deployed in high performance database applications as Tier-0 storage. In these existing applications, a single processor core generates over 20K IOPS. In servers or clusters with large numbers of cores, a balanced system may require thousands of HDDs and over 10kW of power.

The Violin 1010 memory appliance with only 450W of power dramatically improves many important metrics:

                        Violin 1010          15K HDD
Latency          3 microseconds      3 milliseconds
IOPS/$                   >10                0.5
IOPS/Rack Unit     >300K            1K
IOPS/Watt             >2000            20

The exceptionally low latency and cost-effective IOPS of the Violin 1010 enables the creation of new system architectures and applications including the real-time processing of large datasets.