SCIENCE

Violin Memory announced that IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) V6.3.0 supports Violin 3000 Series flash Memory Arrays. With the transition to silicon storage well underway, enterprise customers can take advantage of IBM's virtualization and storage management to transparently deploy flash Memory Arrays in the data center. SVC provides heterogeneous support for multiple storage vendors and media types with centralized management, enabling Memory Arrays to be used in production environments with seamless migration of applications. Additionally, SVC offers a full range of data management tools such as FlashCopy, Easy Tier, live migration and replication that work seamlessly with Violin arrays.

"The adoption of solid state primary storage is gaining momentum, and it's clear that large enterprises are actively seeking out solutions that remove any friction with moving from the disk era to the memory era," said George Crump, lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. "IBM understands that the explosive growth of data and the ongoing march to the fully virtualized data center is stretching current IT capabilities. SVC provides a stable way to manage the evolution of data storage and reduce the risk of new technology adoption while crossing the bridge to the future."

Violin's flash Memory Arrays are suitable for a wide range of data intensive applications including databases, business intelligence, analytics and virtualized environments. They are attached to the network using standard protocols and provide high performance shared storage. The scale-out architecture of SVC allows customers to take full advantage of the high IOPS and sub-millisecond latency performance of Violin arrays. The powerful combination of IBM scale-out and Violin flash Memory Arrays was demonstrated this July. Using Violin arrays, IBM shattered the previous General Parallel File System (GPFS) performance record by 37 times, scanning 10 billion files in 43 minutes.

"The combination of IBM's best-of-breed data management and Violin's industry leading performance is just what data center managers have been asking for," said Jonathan Goldick, CTO of software at Violin Memory. "IBM has specifically designed a highly scalable solution so customers don't have to sacrifice the unique performance of flash Memory Arrays to gain comprehensive data management."