Violin Memory and NAND leader Toshiba announced an expanded alliance that has led to the launch of the currently available Violin Velocity PCIe cards. By virtue of this concentrated alliance, Violin has gained access to Toshiba’s supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and R&D. Both companies will be sharing their enterprise intellectual property (IP) to develop future products. Toshiba has a lot to offer as the owner of a third of the NAND market, while Violin has been developing and producing enterprise-class flash-based storage to meet the high-performance demands of businesses.
Violin Memory and NAND leader Toshiba announced an expanded alliance that has led to the launch of the currently available Violin Velocity PCIe cards. By virtue of this concentrated alliance, Violin has gained access to Toshiba’s supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and R&D. Both companies will be sharing their enterprise intellectual property (IP) to develop future products. Toshiba has a lot to offer as the owner of a third of the NAND market, while Violin has been developing and producing enterprise-class flash-based storage to meet the high-performance demands of businesses.
The Violin Velocity PCIe Card line offers the enterprise a diverse range of options in form factor and capacity, enabling Violin’s Velocity line to stand out as it gives the enterprise options for server configuration. Violin calls the cards third generation, though that likely refers to the technology and software inside, rather than an actual third iteration of a PCIe-based storage product, which this is not.
Breaking down the offerings, first up is the low-profile half-height half-length card that delivers a raw capacity of 1.37TB with 120,000 IOPS. Next, the full-height, half-length card presents a raw capacity of up to 5.5TB with up to 270,000 IOPS. Rounding out the line, the full-height, full-length card provides up to a tremendous 11TB at up to 540,000 IOPS. All of Violin’s performance numbers are shown as a 4K workload with 75/25 read/write mix, though Violin does not disclose any latency performance numbers, which makes creating any meaningful comparison to similar products in the application accelerator space difficult. Violin also doesn’t disclose NAND type, endurance information or card architecture which further confuses the issue of where Velocity is destined to compete.
Pricing and Availability
The Violin Velocity PCIe Cards are available now in 1.37TB to 11TB of capacities (per card) ranging in price from $3/GB to $6/GB based on configuration.
