Violin Memory Announces New Windows All-Flash Arrays 

Violin Memory, Inc. announced worldwide availability of an innovative, flexible pricing model that enables customers to align storage investment with capacity as it is consumed, along with four new Windows Flash Array (WFA) configurations.

For Violin Memory authorized resellers and their end-users, this offering addresses the need for all-flash storage solutions that meet the performance requirements of business critical applications with the comprehensive data services provided by the Windows Flash Array. In addition, the available capacity footprints allow their end-users to buy what they need now and cost-effectively expand as business grows.

Violin Memory is adding 17.5, 26, 35, and 52TB configurations to the WFA product family. The new entry points address the market for lower raw capacity all-flash offerings, while delivering the enterprise-class resiliency and data services as the currently shipping WFA-64. The workhorse WFA configuration - with 70TB of raw capacity, scalable to 280TB - was announced in April and offers enterprise data services such as replication, snapshots, thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression.

“Our latest offerings deliver the transformative economics, performance, and data services of the Windows Flash Array to customers who prefer to take a more incremental approach towards the all-flash data center,” said Eric Herzog, CMO of Violin Memory. “The pay-as-you-grow option lets customers immediately benefit from WFA enterprise data services and performance capabilities while aligning capital expenditure with capacity as it is consumed.”

In addition to new capacity and price points, Violin’s unique “pay-as-you-grow” pricing model allows customers to scale their storage non-disruptively through new capacity software license-based expansion options that deliver 8.8TB increments of raw all-flash capacity.

This pay-as-you-grow approach enables customers to deploy the WFA and immediately benefit from its high performance and enterprise data services while increasing capacity over time.

The flexibility of the WFA doesn’t end with capacity, as customers have a choice in how they interconnect the all-flash array with their existing infrastructure. The WFA family supports either 56 Gb FDR InfiniBand or 10 Gb Ethernet. In both cases, customers benefit from the efficiency and high performance afforded by SMB Direct and the rest of the SMB 3.0 feature set.

In addition, the WFA supports NFS 3.0 and NFS 4.1 for connectivity with application servers running operating systems such as Linux and UNIX. WFA-based file shares are simultaneously available as Windows file shares over SMB 3 and as NFS exports to simplify data sharing across the data center. There are no artificial data silos separating SMB- and NFS-based applications with the WFA - just seamless integration of high performance, easily accessible all-flash storage.

Jointly developed with Microsoft Corp., the WFA is the first all-flash high-performance array solution powered by Windows Storage Server 2012 R2 to deliver a rich set of storage features and data services for the enterprise. The unmatched performance of the WFA transforms data center economics, reducing CAPEX, OPEX, and TCO by receiving more value from their existing IT investments.

The Windows Flash Array enables enterprise workloads, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Windows Server Hyper-V for both server and desktop virtualization, as well as enterprise-wide file servers to meet the needs of global enterprises, while refocusing IT expenditure towards business innovation.