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Violin Memory FINALLY writes dedupe and compression into its latest Concerto

Sweet music to the ears of sysadmins

Violin Memory has fixed a gaping hole in its data management feature set by adding deduplication and compression to its Concerto memory array controller product.

This will cut its effective cost/GB figures to new lows, and strengthens its competitive hand against other all-flash array vendors – such as EMX XtremIO, IBM FlashSystem and Pure Storage.

The Concerto 2200 Data Reduction appliance supplements the Violin 6000 or 7000 all-flash arrays by supporting NFS. The 2200 is a high-availability dual-controller system connecting to Violin's all-flash arrays by Fibre Channel and to hosts by Ethernet. It can "enhance up to four (4) LUNs on existing or new Violin All Flash Arrays with data reduction technology to improve economics in NFS environments."

Inline deduplication and compression are available on the Concerto 2200 and provide up to 672TB of usable storage at a data reduction rate of 6:1. Dedupe can be controlled, not needing to be always-on. Eric Herzog, Violin's CMO and senior veep of alliances, said: “We see competitors who offer ‘always on’ deduplication and compression, but we know that, depending on the customers’ workloads, performance may suffer as a result of the ‘always on’ approach.”

Translation; always-on dedupe and compression can lower Violin flash arrays' performance.

The Concerto 2200 array delivers granular inline deduplication and compression with NFS ingest capabilities and is initially targeted at Virtual Desktop (VDI) and Virtual Server (VSI) infrastructure. A dashboard shows data reduction rates so customers can see the effective rate of deduplication on their workload, and use that information to remove shares from deduplication, or add additional similar workloads that will benefit from data reduction.

We now have the Concerto 7000 management appliance for Violin's all-flash arrays and this additional Concerto 2200 dedupe box for NFS file dedupe and compression. The boxes are multiplying and, surely, their integration and convergence are overdue?

We understand that the dedupe software has been produced by FalconStor.

Get a product overview here (pdf). Violin data reduction services for NFS environments on the Concerto 2200 solution are available now. See them at VMworld USA 2014, August 24– 27 at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, CA., Booth # 2305.

Deduplication and compression for block storage are expected to follow in early 2015. ®

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