violin

VMware running embedded on a Flash Array – Violin signs an OEM agreement

This announcement just showed up in my inbox. I really want to see how it’s architected. Hopefully on the weekend I can dig into this a bit see what is going on under the hood.

Today, 1.35 million IOPSsigned an OEM agreement with VMWare, embedding vSphere natively on Violin’s Flash Memory Arrays, helping customers achieve a fully virtualized data center. This is one of the many steps Violin has taken to apply the benefits of flash create specialized application acceleration appliances like Virtual Database-in-a-box, Private Cloud-in-a-box and VDI-in-a-box.

At noon today, Violin will also announce an ESG Labs test validating Violin’s ability to deliver 1.35 million IOPS for virtualized mixed workloads on VMware vSphere, and scale up to 10,000 virtual desktops on a single array using VMware View.

The numbers are numbers but direction for embedded hypervisors is the interesting part. More local storage happening.

Violin Snags Another Top Notch Exec – Victim VMware

Narayan Venkat, former VP of VMware Cloud Business is the newest person to come over to Violin Memory. Narayan joins a notable list including Garry Veale, HP’s former VP of EMEA’s StorageWorks Division and Jonathan Goldick, former CTO of OnStor. These new individuals plus the talent from Fusion IO that came when Donald Basile, CEO of Violin Memory took over in 2009 are forming a Mercenary Team of Flash Performance.

Narayan, as the New VP of Product Management mission at Violin will be to bring feature rich parity to the Hypervisor world. It’s obvious that vSphere is on the top of the list for Violin but when I asked about Hyper-V both Narayan and Matt Barletta, VP of Product Marketing where quick to answer with a yes. Both Matt and Narayan were very excited when they where talking about Violin’s grass roots in database performance and their plans to tackle Tier I applications that were left off sitting on physical hardware.

Toshiba was the inventor of NAND flash and has made a significant investment in Violin Memory. This gives Violin access to a supply chain and tools to make sure that their flash can work at scale. Adding additional size to your arrays to handle wear levelling will not work at this scale. It’s also worth noting Toshiba hasn’t invested in an American company in 8 years, I think that says a lot about what Violin is accomplishing.

Violin is leaving two empty X86 sockets on thier storage arrays that allow for features to be added to the arrays without affecting performance. Today you only get raw speed but snapshots, VAAI, replication will be coming down the pipe. It also brings opportunity to bring the application to the data. Lately all efforts have been bringing the IO to the compute, I like the change in direction. The empty sockets will also allow for dedupe to happen, not sure if it will be inline or not. All said it will be interesting to see what develops.

Violin isn’t the only one doing Flash today but strong leadership and finalical backing can go along way. If Violin can deliver on the hypervisor, they might have a change to unseat the old boys club on top of the storage stack. I look forward to seeing what Narayan can deliver at his new post. Narayan had VMware’s EUC vision all but memorised when we talked so I am hoping that Project Horizon and Octopus have a small home on some flash array somewhere.