Violin Memory 3200 Flash Memory Array

Introduction

The Violin 3200 is a redundant, modular 3U memory array that scales from 500GB to 10TB SLC NAND Flash and provides the industry’s best price/performance attributes. It is the first in the Violin 3000 series of Memory Arrays that scale to more than 140TB in a rack with performance over 2 Million IOPS.  The enterprise-grade Violin 3200 includes hardware-based flash RAID across hot-swappable memory modules to provide robust data protection and spike free latency of less than 100 microseconds.

Key Features

• Sustainability Purpose-built enterprise solution with sustained read/write throughput for 7×24×365 operations.
• Latency Violin’s flash RAID dramatically reduces latency under load to under 100uS, eliminating the multi-millisecond spikes seen in today’s  SSD and PCIe card solutions.
• Density and Power Efficiency A single Violin 3200 supports 10TB of Flash capacity in a 3U appliance. It consumes 80% less space and power than HDD performance storage.
• Cost per Usable GByte In addition to significantly increasing density, Violin integrates hot-swappable flash RAID and doubles the usable capacity compared with enterprise SSD solutions. The total cost of enterprise-grade Flash storage is lowered by more than 50%.
• Write IOPS Violin’s Flash technology enables over 220K sustained random Write IOPS (4K block), more than twenty times greater than Fiber Channel or PCIe based SSDs.
• Wear The Violin 3200 with 10TB SLC Flash provides wear leveling across the whole array and is guaranteed to sustain continuous writes over its projected 10 year life, double the industry standard. Unlike SSDs, all workloads are supported without wear being a concern to the end-user.

Compelling Flash Performance

Violin Flash memory appliances eliminate the seek-bound limitations of disk storage and delivers significant application performance benefits over performance storage systems with hundreds of hard drives (HDDs) or Flash SSDs. Using a massively parallel architecture with distributed garbage collection in hardware, the Violin 3200 with SLC NAND Flash delivers sustained DRAM-like performance that is 50 times faster than a similar size HDD array:

• 1.4 GB/s bandwidth
• 350K Random Read IOPS
• Over 220K Sustained Random Write IOPS (4K block with RAID)
• Low latency Flash RAID
  • Reads: 80 μsec
  • Writes: 25 μsec
  • Non-blocking Erases
• 10-25x application performance
• 90% reduction in IOPS cost & power
• Power-safe writes without batteries

When the active data of large-scale and high performance applications is assigned to Violin memory appliances, dramatic application acceleration and much higher CPU utilization is achieved. This enables the Virtualized Data Center by supporting high performance random I/O without the need for large DRAM server footprints or thousands of spinning HDDs.

Unmatched Scalability & Reliability

The Violin 3200 is populated with up to 84 x 128GB Violin Intelligent Memory Modules (VIMMs) based on SLC flash memory devices. Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology and Violin’s Flash RAID provide the system with its industry-leading scalability, data reliability and efficiency:

• Density: 10.5TB SLC Flash
• Useable Capacity: 8TB with RAID
• Hot swappable VIMMs with 4+1P RAID and 4 spares
• System power: <120W per Useable TByte
• Endurance: >8TB Writes per Hour for 5 Years

With its higher density and integrated RAID, the Violin 3200 has a 50% lower TCO than competitive servers or performance storage systems with SSDs and RAID 1.

Flexible SAN & Server Connectivity

The Violin 3200 can be directly attached via low latency PCI-Express or SAN attached with Fiber Channel & Ethernet interfaces via a 1U or 2U Network Head that provides LUN management functions.

Direct Attachment: PCIe Interfaces

• Single/Dual PCIe ×4 Interfaces
• Single PCIe ×8 Interface
• SCSI and Block Device Driver modes
• Linux: 32 bit and 64 bit driver support
• Solaris, OpenSolaris (x86) driver support
• Microsoft: 32 bit and 64bit driver support

LAN/SAN Attachment: Network Head

• 2-10 8Gb Fiber Channel
• 2-10 4Gb Fiber Channel
• 2-4 10Gb Ethernet (iSCSI or FCoE)
• LUN Management: Masking, Snapshots
• Network Heads: Solaris, FalconStor, OpenFiler
• Network Head Performance: 400K IOPS

A network head can handle up to 5 memory shelves.

The Industry's First Switched Memory Architecture

Violin has developed the industry’s first switched memory architecture. This patent-pending architecture is called Violin Switched Memory (VXM).  With VXM, each module is part of a switched array which supports large topologies and fault tolerance while enabling multiple memory types. Unlike other memory interconnects, VXM was designed from the ground-up for power efficiency and performance.

Previous memory solutions have not scaled because they relied on classical linear bus topologies. Bus speeds limit the number of registered DIMMs that can be supported in a single channel to fewer than eight and, as speeds increase, to just one or two. Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) repeated bus technology allows 8 modules per channel and uses a serial technology to reduce the pin-count required. However, FB-DIMM provides only a minor improvement in scale and requires significant additional power for the Advanced Memory Buffer (AMB) chip.

Memory architectures for enterprise-class applications and the networking industry will benefit from the evolution from memory buses to a Switched Memory architecture to meet their performance, scalability, manageability and fault tolerance requirements.