Violin Flash technology is clean-slate system design based on Violin Switched Memory and patent-pending flash vRAID.

Massively Parallel

A single Violin 3200 supports over 4000 Flash devices and 500 independent Flash interfaces. This provides the bandwidth need for outstanding Flash performance. This is more than 4 times greater bandwidth than other storage systems and 50 times greater than most SSDs.

Hardware-based Flash Control

Other SSDs use processors and software to perform RAID, page mapping and garbage collection. Violin implements these functions in hardware to reduce latency and dramatically increase sustained random Write IOPS from less than 10,000 to more than 220,000.

Low Latency flash vRAID

Violin’s patent-pending Flash vRAID technology, designed specifically to enhance NAND Flash system performance, provides full RAID data protection and a fundamentally more efficient and higher performance solution. Existing RAID 5 & 6 solutions rely on Read-Modify-Write operations that are unsuited to Flash. Unlike inefficient RAID 1 (50% efficient) solutions, Violin’s Flash RAID enables 80% usable capacity and bandwidth.

Violin’s Flash vRAID guarantees spike-free latency under load by making sure there aren’t any reads blocked by erases. Notably, the 70 microsecond latency of the Violin 3200 is 80% lower than Tier-1 storage cache (DRAM) and significantly improves metrics such as File Read & Write, response and query times.

“Violin has really gotten into the nitty-gritty details of Flash and has created a solution that addresses the main issues the technology faces. What is particularly compelling is how Violin Memory has been able to overcome the challenges inherently created by Flash redundancy and sustained read/write – it’s a very interesting concept.”

Dave Hill, Mesabi Group

Related Links:
Violin Flash press release