Reading Time: 3 minutes

This was the year of the reborn of Violin Systems with a new name but still the all-flash storage area.

Now Violin® Systems LLC has announced the latest addition to the Violin Extreme Performance Storage Platform family, the Violin XVS™ 8, which delivers consistent high performance with low latency and enterprise-class data services, enabling customers to accelerate business-critical workloads while significantly reducing IT infrastructure costs.

Among the key new features of the XVS 8:

  • Single Platform with Selectable Efficiencies by LUN – Violin simplifies the customer experience by allowing selectable deduplication and compression per LUN to enable high performance for applications requiring data efficiencies and extreme performance for applications requiring the lowest possible latency.
  • NVMe over Fibre Channel – 32Gb FC ensures performance for bigger workloads, greater scaling and better flexibility in failover configurations with IOPS performance as low as 50 microseconds.  In-place software updates enable NVMe over Fabric.
  • Cloud-Based Predictive Analytics – leverages past and present statistics to enable future tuning.  Combined with new Augmented Reality mobile application, XVS delivers real-time insight into system performance to ensure workloads metrics are being met.
  • Application Infrastructure Ecosystem Updates – XVS integrates into the Splunk> ecosystem for customers to enjoy filtered call-home alerts into their Splunk> dashboards. Implementation with VMware VASA 3.0 displays storage information within vCenter and allows fine VM-level control directly from vSphere.

“Evolving workloads are driving an increasing need for tier 0 performance for relational database as well as next generation, more real-time applications in the big data analytics arena, and these requirements are outrunning the ability of existing architectures to consistently deliver the performance needed at scale,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president of server and storage infrastructure, IDC.  “Vendors like Violin Systems are targeting this space with solutions that far outrun the ability of SCSI-based all-flash platforms, but what is interesting about Violin’s new offering is that they combine this class of performance with a full complement of mature, enterprise-class data services that can be selectively applied at the volume level, allowing it to be used to cost-effectively host mixed workloads that include a variety of tier 0 as well as other primary storage environments.”

The promise of Violin XVS 8 is to offer the best combination of extreme storage performance, low total cost of ownership and high return on investment, enabling organizations to improve the operational efficiency needed to meet both current and future business demands.

Performance seems very promising: with 4K, 100% Read is possible to have 50µs with NVMe over FC, or 400µs latency @ 1M IOPS or 1ms latency @ 2M IOPS.

But of course facts are more important than numbers… will be interesting see which kind of certification and validation this platform will have and the type of market adoption.

Share

Related Posts

  • The reborn of Violin Systems

    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:…

  • Violin Systems is acquiring X-IO Storage

    Violin Systems has announced it has signed a Letter of Intent with X-IO Technologies to acquire X-IO Storage, the division of X-IO Technologies that developed the popular Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) flash and hybrid storage array product lines. Financial terms were not disclosed but the…

  • VMworld EU 2014 Report – Violin Memory

    During the recent VMworld Europe, I’ve got the opportunity to talk with Steven Willson (VP Technology Services EMEA at Violin Memory) and Eric Herzog (Chief Marketing Officer and SVP of Alliances at Violin Memory) of Violin Memory about their storage products and their users cases in virtualization projects.…

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.