Sunday, August 26, 2012

Violin Memory OEMs VMware’s Virtualization Technology


Violin Memory announced an OEM agreement with VMware, offering virtualization-in-a-box to enterprise customers. This enables companies to run business critical and big data applications at the speed of memory in virtualized and cloud environments.

The deal enables vSphere to run natively on Violin’s flash Memory Arrays, so that customers can put business critical applications directly on Violin’s system to get industry leading storage performance without worrying about the configuration or management of traditional storage networks.

“Violin has identified the virtualization challenges with disk-based storage infrastructures and set out to eliminate those barriers using flash,” said Narayan Venkat, vice president of products for Violin Memory. “By partnering with VMware, we enable our customers to achieve their goal of a fully virtualized data center. This is one of the many steps we’ve taken to apply the benefits of flash to virtualized environments, and create specialized application acceleration appliances like Virtual Database-in-a-box, Private Cloud-in-a-box and VDI-in-a-box.”

Violin Memory also confirmed its ability to deliver 1.35 million IOPS for virtualized mixed workloads on VMware vSphere.  This result has been validated by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).  The test also showed Violin Memory Arrays can scale up to 10,000 virtual desktops on Violin arrays using VMware View without restrictions.

Violin Memory said flash memory arrays are superior to legacy HDD-based storage systems, which cannot manage the performance and scalability required to virtualize business critical applications and desktops.   By supporting 10,000+ desktops through sustained low latency, even during load, the Violin Memory 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays 6000 system enables large enterprise-wide VDI with a small storage footprint in the data center.