Many people probably remember Violin Memory and it’s products, probably one of the first in the All Flash Array (AFA) field. Founded in 2005 as Violin Technologies by Donpaul Stephens and Jon Bennett.
I’ve talk about them several times (see for example this 2012 post: Powering the cloud report – Violin Memory), because they got interesting technologies. But when they enter in the stock exchange, the journey wasn’t lucky enough: On December 14, 2016 Violin Memory filed for Chapter 11 Federal Bankruptcy protection.
Violin Memory architecture probably was also too proprietary and costly: they not use solid state drives (SSD), but instead uses a proprietary design referred to as flash fabric architecture (FFA), consisting of a mesh of NAND flash dies, modules that organize the mesh of flash dies, and a proprietary switched architecture for fault tolerance.
But in the last year, they reborn with a new company and a new name: Violin Systems.
The product line is still based on Concerto OS7, Violin’s OSes, closely integrated with their flash fabric architecture for optimum performance and resilience.
Also the Violin Flash Storage Platform, seems similar to previous and based on different series, like:
- Flash Storage Platform 7700: Scale-up Modular Primary Storage at the Cost of Enterprise Disk
1 Million IOPS at 1 ms Latency and up to 1.4 PB Effective Capacity in a Single Name Space - Flash Storage Platform 7650: Extreme Performance All Flash Storage
1 Million IOPS at <200 µsec Latency - Flash Storage Platform 7450: High Performance All Flash Primary Storage
.5 PB Effective Capacity in 3U
So will be interesting see if this time the market will reach different and will repay Violin for his vision (for the AFA storage) and for his platform.
For sure they are investing a lot, in the last months, to re-enter again in the games. Recently Mark Lewis, a well-known industry veteran of enterprise storage and software, joins the company as executive chairman. Lewis will also be executing the day-to-day duties of CEO while current Violin CEO and president Ebrahim Abbasi is out on medical leave.
Through his more than 30-year career, Lewis has leveraged his extensive experience in driving storage and software solutions adopted by some of the largest enterprises in the world to grow several new businesses to more than $250 million in revenue, using acquisitions to transform existing businesses and managing several multi-billion-dollar product divisions. Previous leadership positions include executive vice president and CTO of EMC and general manager of Compaq’s storage business, among others. An innovator, technologist and industry thought leader, Lewis has been awarded more than 12 patents.
