Violin memory appliances are designed from the ground up for a new tier in the storage hierarchy.

Tiered storage has enabled cost and performance management of large scale enterprise storage infrastructure. The most commonly used Tiers have been:

• Tier 3: Archival Storage — Tape libraries or MAID with VTL
• Tier 2: Capacity Storage — slower SATA/SAS drives
• Tier 1: Performance Storage — 15K rpm Fibre Channel drives

The key differentiator between each Tier is IOPS per GByte with Tier 1 being as much as 10 times faster than Tier 2.  This is often achieved at great expense with only the outer third of the drive being used and in many cases, the data being distributed sparsely to improve performance.

Solid state storage can be more than 10 times faster than Tier 1 storage and hence provides the basis for:

• Tier 0: High performance Storage — Solid state memory storage systems

Violin memory appliances provide the critical elements for this new storage tier. In particular, Violin brings to the table:

• Scalability: High density DRAM and Flash enables applications to fit with a reasonable space and power budget. 80TB per rack of solid state is supported by the technology!
• Performance: Memory appliance support IOPS up to 3M per appliance and latencies as low as 3 microseconds, 1000 times faster than hard disk solutions.
• Lower Total Cost: Memory appliances remove many of the overheads associated with storage and integrate the RAID functions to dramatically lower both cost/IOPS and cost/GB.

Can you identify your active data set?

Active data is the data that your organization can be expected to process or use in the near future. If you can identify this data, you can greatly enhance storage performance at a much lower cost.

• Database files in operation
• Email and messaging systems
• Records of all recent commercial transactions (last quarter)
• Engineering files that have been accessed in last month
• Sales & marketing materials for current products