The 3rd generation of flash storage designed for the enterprise

Third generation flash Memory Arrays are designed from the ground up to address short-comings found in other SSD products.  Advantages:

  • Sustained read/write throughput
  • Spike-free low latency
  • 7 x 24 x 365 operation
  • Hot swap and fail-in-place sparing
  • SAN Connectivity 4/8G FC, 10Gb FCoE

Violin’s products break out of the first generation solid-state hard drive and second generation PCIe card models.  Violin’s chassis based solutions allow for enterprise class reliability and performance with the full maintenance and management capabilities enterprise customers expect.   Different from other third-generation chassis players, Violin’s bottoms-up design allows for hot swapping failed components, higher density chassis, and seamless integration into applications, appliances, SANs, and data centers.   Future product will extend Violin’s ease of integration, reliability, and packing density yet further.

Second generation PCIe based SSDs

Installed directly into the server these PCIe card-based solutions have higher performance than generation one devices but introduce other issues.  Advantages include:

  • Greater channel bandwidth due to PCIe
  • Less rack density

Disadvantages:

  • Locking a valuable resource in a single server (no sharing)
  • Lacking in reliability features RAID impractical due to PCIe slot availability
  • Most consume valuable server resources (CPU, memory, I/O bandwidth) for metadata
  • Device driver and software maintenance required on EVERY installed server
  • Must be managed individually – increased cost of ownership
  • Lack of scalability and sustained write-performance is typically poor, often worse than HDD
  • Hosting server must be powered down to service (no hot swap)

First generation SSDs

Designed to be a drop-in replacement for equivalent sized HDDs. Capacities are typically less than equivalent HDDs.  Advantages include:

  • Identical Form Factor to HDDs
  • IOP performance higher compared to individual HDDs

Disadvantages:

  • Lacking in reliability features
  • Legacy connectivity channels limit usable performance
  • Lack of scalability and sustained write-performance is typically poor, sometimes worse than HDD
  • Severely performance-limited behind controllers designed for HDD systems