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Violin plays storage world like a fiddle, 140 characters at a time

New marketing bloke teases out slivers of info about new array

Violin Memory's flash array fightback starts with a present from the Easter bunny: a whole new array.

Violin, you will recall, lost CEO Don Basile after its IPO was followed by deepening losses and falling share prices.

Incoming CEO Kevin DeNuccio has stabilised the ship, refocussed engineering and recruited new executives, one of whom is chief marketing officer Eric Herzog. He joined from a senior marketing position at EMC.

So now we are all watching and waiting for news on the product front. Herzog has made all of us Violin watchers twitch with a tweet:

Violin's new array will run SQL twice as fast and cut server compute loads by 30 per cent, it says; obviously a tasty little marketing amuse bouche from a man who, until recently, had first-hand experience of EMC's XtremIO all-flash array marketing. Is he going to position Violin as a reliable, proven incumbent with EMC's all-flash array as a risky first-generation unproven startup-equivalent?

That apart, we wonder if some of the processing of SQL queries will be carried out inside Violin's flash array, using its server engine? Is this going to be a new twist in the application-aware storage idea?

We might envisage the coming array will use the latest Toshiba NAND; the 19nm stuff. SLC or MLC, or both?

Lots of questions here; Herzog has been asked for more details. His reply was: "Not yet. Will be in touch soon."

Then he went and tweeted a second time, answering one of our questions:

So the new array will, allegedly:

  • Increase Hyper-V writes by 41 per cent
  • Increase SQL reads by 54 per cent
  • Replicate, dedupe and snapshot

Tasty! When Herzog does get in touch with us, Vulture Central's storage desk will pass on the goods. ®

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