Sustained Performance 7 x 24 x 365

The Violin 3200 is a redundant, modular 3U memory array that scales from 500GB to 10TB SLC NAND Flash and provides the industry’s best price/performance attributes. It is the first in the Violin 3000 series of Memory Arrays that scale to more than 140TB in a rack with performance over 2 Million IOPS.  The enterprise-grade Violin 3200 includes hardware-based flash RAID across hot-swappable memory modules to provide robust data protection and spike free latency of less than 100 microseconds.

“To recognize the full potential of NAND flash it should be delivered in a purpose built system designed specifically to harness the revolutionary nature of the technology and not retro-fitted into a legacy system designed for a mechanical era.  The Memory Array is a new category designed to harness the performance of the solid state storage tier. Memory Arrays like Violin 3200 that scale in every direction; capacity, cost per IOP and footprint are key milestones in the broad acceptance of solid state technology in the Enterprise.”

George Crump, Lead Analyst with Storage Switzerland

  • Sustainability Purpose-built enterprise solution with sustained read/write throughput for 7×24×365 operations.
  • Latency Violin’s flash RAID dramatically reduces latency under load to under 100uS, eliminating the multi-millisecond spikes seen in today’s  SSD and PCIe card solutions.
  • Density and Power Efficiency A single Violin 3200 supports 10TB of Flash capacity in a 3U appliance. It consumes 80% less space and power than HDD performance storage.
  • Cost per Usable GByte In addition to significantly increasing density, Violin integrates hot-swappable flash RAID and doubles the usable capacity compared with enterprise SSD solutions. The total cost of enterprise-grade Flash storage is lowered by more than 50%.
  • Write IOPS Violin’s Flash technology enables over 220K sustained random Write IOPS (4K block), more than twenty times greater than Fiber Channel or PCIe based SSDs.
  • Wear The Violin 3200 with 10TB SLC Flash provides wear leveling across the whole array and is guaranteed to sustain continuous writes over its projected 10 year life, double the industry standard. Unlike SSDs, all workloads are supported without wear being a concern to the end-user.
White Papers

Violin Memory Flash RAID Overview

Violin Memory pioneered and leads the Memory Array market segment allowing the Enterprise to realize the long-held ideal of balancing the performance of computing, networking, and storage resources. Violin’s 3200 series product line brings flash memory into the Enterprise Data Center with inherent reliability (flash RAID), sustained throughput, market-leading and “spike free” latency, and Enterprise class availability, reliability, and serviceability.

Today’s performance storage solutions are built with low-cost disk drives aggregated by external controllers and software to ensure data reliability; usually using various forms of RAID. While massive aggregation of drives, be they magnetic or solid-state, can ramp up throughput (IOPS), the overhead of the controllers and legacy hard-drive interfaces act to limit improvements to latency performance. Typically, storage providers do not talk much about latency because within traditional storage arrays it cannot be improved by scaling the quantity of drives.

Violin Memory solves both the throughput (IOPS) problem and the latency problem in its Memory Arrays by embedding RAID within Violin’s patent pending switched-memory architecture in an integrated platform: NAND flash bundled into hot-swappable memory modules (VIMMs) using hardware flash RAID controllers designed specifically to aggregate the flash and protect the data within the Memory Array itself. The RAID controller is integrated for low cost, low latency and high-speed performance… and not an add-on or separate controller. Violin’s unique tightly-embedded flash RAID enables the delivery of Violin’s sustained performance with very low, spike-free latency.

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Flash Memory Arrays: Enabling the Virtualized Data Center

Virtualization continues to spread throughout the data center at an unrelenting pace. Server virtualization coupled with multi-core processors means as many as 20 virtual servers can be hosted on one physical platform. Storage virtualization reduces the number of storage systems and the ultimate capacity required. And in the network, virtualization promises to bring about a convergence with storage protocols which will eliminate much of the cabling and drastically reduce the number of switches and adapters required.

One element continues to act as the bottleneck – spinning hard disk drives (HDDs). While the latest multi-core CPU’s process billions of operations a second, and local memory can deal with tens of millions of operations a second, hard drives move at a far more leisurely pace. The fastest disks around have access times averaging about 5 milliseconds, which equates to 200 operations per second.

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Data Sheets

Silicon Storage for the Enterprise Data Center

The Violin 3200 is the industry’s most scalable and highest performing Flash memory array. It enables the lowest latency and highest IOPS storage infrastructure. Built from the ground up to deliver sustained performance and reliability with Flash and integrated RAID, it delivers dramatically better performance at lower cost than traditional storage systems with Flash SSDs and RAID. .

Violin Flash memory appliances eliminate the seek-bound limitations of disk storage and delivers significant application performance benefits over performance storage systems with hundreds of hard drives (HDDs) or Flash SSDs. Using a massively parallel architecture with distributed garbage collection in hardware, the Violin 3200 with SLC NAND Flash delivers sustained DRAM-like performance that is 50 times faster than a similar size HDD array.

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PDF Silicon Storage for the Enterprise Data Center
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