TECHNOLOGY
Industry’s Highest Performing Flash
Violin Flash technology delivers much higher performance through a clean-slate system design that leverages the advantages of Violin Switched Memory. The key components of this patent-pending technology are:
Massively Parallel Flash Operation
A single Violin 1010 supports over 4000 Flash devices and 500 independent Flash interfaces. This provides the bandwidth need for outstanding Flash performance. This is more than 4 times greater bandwidth than other storage systems and 50 times greater than most SSDs.
Hardware-based Flash Control
Other SSDs use processors and software to perform RAID, page mapping and garbage collection. Violin implements these functions in hardware to reduce latency and dramatically increase sustained random Write IOPS from less than 10,000 to more than 100,000.
Low Latency RAID
Violin’s patent-pending Flash RAID technology, designed specifically to enhance NAND Flash system performance, provides full RAID data protection and a fundamentally more efficient and higher performance solution. Existing RAID 5 & 6 solutions rely on Read-Modify-Write operations that are unsuited to Flash. Unlike inefficient RAID 1 solutions, Violin’s Flash RAID enables 60% more useable capacity and bandwidth. Violin’s Flash RAID also reduces latency under load by hundreds of microseconds through Flash-specific scheduling of operations. Notably, the 70 microsecond latency of the Violin 1010 is 80% lower than Tier-1 storage cache (DRAM) and significantly improves metrics such as File Read & Write times, response time and query time.
Dave Hill – Mesabi Group
“Violin has really gotten into the nitty-gritty details of Flash and has created a solution that addresses the main issues the technology faces. What is particularly compelling is how Violin Memory has been able to overcome the challenges inherently created by Flash redundancy and sustained read/write – it’s a very interesting concept.”
