Single Level and Multi Level Cell FLASH from investor Toshiba is key to price and performance

September 27, 2011

Violin on Tuesday rolled out two new storage arrays , the 6616 single-level cell array and the 6232 multi-level cell array, which are intended to be used as primary storage for business-critical applications. Both arrays have dual controllers, power supplies and VIMMs, Violin’s virtual memory modules, which are used for self-healing and memory aggregation. And each component is how-swappable and protected with vRAID, Violin’s RAID-like functionality.

The 6000 Series also has a built-in gateway that provides connectivity to Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks. The 6616 has a raw capacity of 16TB and a useable capacity of 12TB. The 6232 has a raw capacity of 32TB and a useable capacity of 22TB. Bandwidth ticks out at 4GBps for the 6616 and 2GBps for the 6232. The 6616 shows one million IOPs on sustained read/write with 4K packets; the 6232 shows half the performance of the 6616.

Our Take: Violin is in a hyper-growth stage, with 225 employees expected to grow to over 400 in early 2012. HP is an OEM partner and both HP and IBM have published world-beating benchmarks with Violin arrays. Probably the most strategic partnership is with Toshiba, which operates the world’s largest flash foundry in Yokkaichi, Honshu, Japan. Toshiba is a major investor in Violin. We believe this partnership is critical to the future success of Violin which has implemented significant vertical integration using properties of the Toshiba silicon.

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