Violin Memory

Violin Memory
Public
Traded as NYSE: VMEM
Founded 2005[1]
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, U.S.
Key people
 CEO: Kevin DeNuccio
Website www.violin-memory.com

Violin Memory is a public American company based in Silicon Valley, California, that designs and manufactures computer data storage products.

Corporate history

The company was founded in 2005 as Violin Technologies by Donpaul Stephens and Jon Bennett in Iselin, New Jersey. Series A financing valued over $10 million was raised in 2010. Two more rounds of financing in 2011 raised an additional $75 million. Corporate investors included Juniper Networks and Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC). It was based in Mountain View, California around this time.

Series D financing $80 million in March 2012 was led by SAP Ventures (arm of SAP AG), and included Highland Capital, GSV and others. The reported valuation was over $800 million.[2][3]

Violin Memory went public in September 2013, raising $162 million at a price of $9 a share.[4][4] Its stock price dropped to $2 a share after its largest partner, Hewlett Packard, became a competitor and due to concerns of how quickly it was spending money.[4] The company experienced losses of $34 million the following year and the board called for the resignation of the CEO.[5] Additionally, five shareholder lawsuits were filed against the company, alleging it did not disclose the financial impact expected from a federal shutdown.[4] in December 2013 the company terminated CEO Basile,[6] replacing him with Kevin DeNuccio in February 2014.

Technology

Violin Memory does not use solid state drives (SSD), but instead uses a proprietary design referred to as Flash Fabric Architecture[7] (FFA). The FFA is multiple layers of technologies that consists of: a mesh of thousands of NAND flash dies, Violin Intelligent Memory Modules (VIMM)[8] that organize the mesh of flash dies, VIMMs that are integrated into a proprietary switched architecture, Violin Memory’s proprietary vRAID[9] for fault tolerance. In September 2011 Violin announced the 6000 series all-silicon shared flash memory storage arrays.[10]

vMOS[11][12] is Violin Memory’s software layer that integrates with the FFA to provide data protection, management and connectivity to the host.

Products

The Violin 7000 series includes enterprise data services[13][14][15]

The 7000[16] series can scale up to four 6000 series arrays for up to 280TB of capacity[17]

The Violin 6000 series[18] all flash arrays include the 6600, 6200 and 6100. The 6600[19] is based on SLC flash and offers 17.5TB of capacity. The 6200[20] offers flash performance at capacities from 17.5 to 70TB. The 6100[21] is a smaller array at lower price of entry with a pay as you grow[22] option.

The Windows Flash Array (WFA)[23] uses Microsoft’s Storage Server 2012 R2 instead of vMOS. Jointly developed with Microsoft, the WFA supports Microsoft’s SMB Direct protocol and is an optimized NAS solution for Microsoft[24]

References

  1. ↑ "Violin Memory: Company". Violin Memory. Retrieved 2011-07-28.
  2. ↑ "Violin Memory raises $50M, brings valuation to $800M". Silicon Valley Business Journal. March 30, 2012. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities". Edgar. US Securities and Exchange Commission. March 29, 2012. Retrieved August 14, 2013.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Bort, Julie (December 11, 2013). "Newly Public Company Violin Memory Is In Turmoil And The Lawsuits Are Flying". Retrieved February 10, 2015.
  5. ↑ "Can a new CEO pull Violin Memory out of its current slump?". The Register. January 7, 2014. Retrieved February 10, 2015.
  6. ↑ "Struggling Flash Storage Firm Violin Memory Fires Its CEO". VentureBeat. December 16, 2013. Retrieved February 3, 2014.
  7. ↑ Michael Cusanelli (June 27, 2014). "Violin Memory Delivers 'Business in a Flash' with Concerto 7000". thevarguy.com.
  8. ↑ Antony Adshead (October 12, 2012). "Violin - a proudly proprietary storage vendor . . .". ComputerWeekly.com.
  9. ↑ Chin-Fah, Heoh (March 8, 2012). "we raid vRAID". Storage GaGa Blog.
  10. ↑ Robin Harris (April 11, 2012). "Violin’s clean-sheet architecture". Storage Mojo blog. Retrieved September 17, 2013.
  11. ↑ Brian Beeler (August 13, 2012). "Violin Pairs with Symantec to Deliver Data Management Tools". StorageReview.com.
  12. ↑ Chris Mellor (August 14, 2012). "Symantec, Violin in no-strings fling for flash array software". The Register.
  13. ↑ "VIOLIN CONCERTO 7000 ALL FLASH ARRAY; PERFORMANCE PACKED WITH DATA SERVICES". Product Profile. Taneja Group Technology Analysts. June 2014.
  14. ↑ Nick Heath (June 24, 2014). "Violin Memory gives its flash storage an enterprise-friendly makeover". ZDNet.
  15. ↑ Steve Wexler (June 25, 2014). "Violin: In the data center, no one can hear you scream!". IT Trends & Analysis.
  16. ↑ Peter Williams (June 26, 2014). "Violin: Violin Memory back in all-flash storage tune with new data management strings". Bloor.
  17. ↑ Pedro Hernandez (June 24, 2014). "Violin Plays a Flashy Concerto with New 7000 Array". InfoStor.
  18. ↑ "Three New All Flash Arrays 6100 (17.5TB, 26TB and 35TB) Revealed by Violin Memory". StorageNewsletter.com (Press Release). StorageNewsletter.com. August 12, 2014.
  19. ↑ Timothy Prickett Morgan (October 18, 2013). "Violin Turns Flash Arrays Into Blazing Clusters". EnterpriseTech.
  20. ↑ Carol Sliwa (May 2014). "Violin 6000 arrays feature proprietary flash modules, memory fabric". SearchSolidStateStorage.com.
  21. ↑ Chris Mellor (August 4, 2014). "Violin strings up cheaper instrument: 17.5TB flash box for $100k + change". The Register.
  22. ↑ Carol Sliwa (July 15, 2014). "Violin storage adds WFA models, pay-as-you-grow option". SearchSolidStateStorage.com.
  23. ↑ "Violin Memory - Interview". truebit.tv podcast. W. Curtis Preston. April 28, 2014.
  24. ↑ "Building High Performance Storage for Hyper-V Cluster on Scale-Out File Servers using Violin Windows Flash Arrays". White Paper. Microsoft. October 2014.

External links