Violin Memory has introduced the 6264 array, doubling the capacity of its earlier 6232 product from 32 terabutes (TB) to 64TB, while remaining in the same form factor. The company has done this by migrating to 19nm MLC NAND flash from Toshiba.
Violin says that this move was made possible by the fact that the company’s arrays aren’t built using standard SSDs, and claims that this has caused Violin’s all flash array revenues to be significantly higher than those of any of its competitors.
With this product the company doubles its power efficiency, when measured in watts per gigabyte, and boosts its performance from 500 IOPS to 750 IOPS. Violin boasts that this is 5-10 times the performance of EMC’s highest-performing array, and claims that the new system has 3 times better economics than its predecessor. Violin calls this “Disruptive Economics.”
Violin claims that one advantage the company holds over its competition is that its arrays’ performance increases with increasing capacity due to their high internal parallelism. According to the company’s management, competing arrays must increase their footprint in proportion to their performance increases.
Along with the 6264’s introduction the company pitched its Symphony management software, that supports storage administration anywhere wirelessly even on an iPhone or Android device. With a big set of analytical tools this software can zero in on storage hot spots and alert the administrator of impending issues anywhere, any time.
Both products are already commercially available and have been deployed in some customer sites, with the 6264 selling from $5-10 per gigabyte, uncompressed.
