Cloud computing has evolved to the point where it’s a critical component to virtually every company’s IT strategy. Industry vocabulary may have changed, but we’re simply entering a new phase in the ongoing march toward a true utility model for computing. The distinction between private, public, and hybrid clouds will become less relevant, as will the physical type and location of the infrastructure.

Of course someone has to build data centers – and the underlying technology has to support many key requirements. Cloud infrastructure needs to be fully virtualized, highly scalable, and be elastic enough to rapidly respond to changes. Violin flash Memory Arrays support all of these objectives and are critical for the paramount goal: consistently meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Flash Memory Appliances in the Cloud
Meeting the SLA is the make or break decision when choosing to deploy an application in the cloud. If data can’t be accessed quickly an application will have no chance of meeting the SLA. Violin Memory Arrays provide consistent low latency ensuring storage performance is not an inhibitor when deploying cloud applications. Memory arrays deliver the scalability required for large multi-tenant cloud environments.

A single array scales to 40TB of flash and multiple arrays can be clustered together to create large pools of storage. Imagine the power of half a Petabyte of flash delivering over two million IOPS in a single rack. The arrays attach to the network with either Fiber Channel (FC) or 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) connections and can be shared by hundreds or thousands of clients. Databases and other I/O intensive applications can move to the cloud and still meet stringent SLA requirements.

Support for Virtualized Environments
Because cloud environments are highly virtualized the storage infrastructure needs to support the I/O requirements of hundreds to thousands of VMs accessing shared data. Delivering consistent low latency (under 100 µsec) Violin Memory Arrays provide VMs with nearly instantaneous access to data. The low latency and high throughput characteristics of the arrays effectively eliminate the storage I/O bottleneck in virtualized environments. Additional benefits include:

• Increase VM performance
• Consolidate more VMs per physical server
• Lower power, cooling and floor space costs
• No changes to existing applications

Learn more about flash Memory Arrays in virtualized environments.