When we spoke with Violin’s senior management team after Toshiba took a large equity position in the company, we were assured that significant new products were coming. Tuesday’s announcement of the 3200 Flash Memory Array made good on that promise. The new product, in a 3U (5 ¼” high) rack package offers scalability from 500GB to 10TB in a single appliance, and can scale to more than 140TB by adding multiple appliances. Using Single Level Cell (SLC) technology, the 3200, in a full-up configuration, has an MSRP of $20 per GB. This makes the 3200, which supports 8GB Fibre Channel connectivity, price competitive with enterprise Hard Disk Drive (HDD) based systems on a cost per GB basis. Of course, we expect SLC appliances to operate at super speeds, but the architecture embodied in the 3200 supports aggregate bandwidth that trumps everything currently available.

How do they do it? Having Toshiba, the largest volume manufacturer of flash memories, as a close partner can’t hurt. But Violin has serious intellectual property for switching between flash modules that allows aggregation of an order of magnitude over existing appliances with linear growth in bandwidth as additional appliances are added. One key to the price performance is the Violin Intelligent Memory Module (VIMM). Like a DIMM, only built out of flash instead of DRAM, an appliance supports up to 84 VIMMs, each with 128GB of SLC flash. Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology, and Violin’s flash RAID provide the rest of the secret recipe. By aggregation, and splitting the flash control logic between the Intel Nehalem processor on the system board and the individual VIMMs, substantial economies of scale can be achieved when compared with drive format SSDs that need to self contain flash control and provide drive emulation over a Serial SCSI (SAS), Fibre Channel (FC), or Serial ATA (SATA) interface, all of which have individual silicon and connector hardware costs, not to mention throughput penalties. Performance, flash management, and reliability are enhanced by the proprietary RAID implementation that uses a four VIMM plus one (like RAID 5) to spread data across multiple devices, and even allows hot swapping of VIMMs.

Connectivity support is wide and deep. For direct attached storage (DAS) configurations, PCIe support is offered with both SCSI and block drivers for Windows, Solaris and Linux. For SAN and LAN connectivity, NAS heads from Falconstor, OpenFiler, and systems running Violin software with OpenSolaris are available that provide up to 10 8Gb FC and up to four 10Gb Ethernet or Fibre Channel over Ethernet options. The Violin 3200 is currently available.