VIOLIN Insights

At a young age, we are pre-programmed to believe that high performance is expensive.  As kids, we played with toy cars of Ferrari and Porsche that are known for performance but associated with high cost and only the rich typically own.  Additionally, such cars are not known for efficiency or for that matter reliability until the dawn of Tesla electric cars.  Tesla offers high-performance acceleration, zero gas costs, low cost of operation and it truly transforms the pre-programmed thinking. Unfortunately, the acquisition cost of a Tesla is not that affordable for everyone, yet.

The rate in which applications can complete their tasks for your business can often determine the success of your business. Many successful businesses segment their applications by their contribution to revenue or profit.  These businesses have made the leap in their IT strategies from IT as a resource (that is shared in many cases) to IT as a success criterion for a specific part of their business.  AFAs or all-flash arrays is one approach to solve the need for speed, however not all AFAs solve application problems well.

NVMe has been one of the hottest topics in the storage industry for a while now.  Rightfully so, it is making an impact in the storage industry and moving computing forward.  For storage vendors and customers alike, it is important to be ready as certain aspects of NVMe become standard.  There are two key aspects of NVMe, as it promises to solve backend bottlenecks to flash devices and improve the SAN performance to servers over fabrics.  In this blog, I will share my perspective on NVMe flash modules and how, here at Violin, we solve the flash device performance aspect.

With all the technology approaches in the market place to modernize IT, it is a challenge to maneuver through all the noise and figure out which is the best approach for you and your company.   Whether you are considering cloud, hyper-converged, revolutionary database products, or a new dev ops program, it all seems daunting. In recent conversations and blogs that I have read, any of these changes need to be accompanied by a change in cultural and skill set.  The complexity of the changes and the impact they have on an organization reminds me of the process I went through to decide whether or not to modernize my existing home or buy new.

Today, Violin Systems signed an agreement to acquire X-IO Storage.  This is big.  Here is why we are doing it.

Today we announced a really cool new product called the XVS 8. In a nutshell, we made the fastest enterprise storage in the world – faster. Speed, and by speed, I mean ultra-low latency, can do some amazing things. It does the obvious, it lets your applications run faster, increasing profitability and customer satisfaction. Lowering latency does another cool thing, it lets you consolidate your infrastructure.

I was having coffee with a friend of mine a few weeks ago and he was talking about some new phone coming out that would be 5G ready. 

Now, I’m not a big “phone” guy and my friend is not in any a “Technology” guy, at least not that he realizes. As a matter of fact, he often picks at me for being a nerd. However, in taking about 5G, it made me start thinking about the impact that 5G will have on me and what I do for a living here at Violin Systems.

In many cultures around the world, there is a reverent respect for the life experience achieved by elders. In industry, those of us who have been around long enough eventually reach “veteran” status and if we’re lucky carry some sway with our views of where our business has been and where it is going. I’m fortunate enough to be one of those lucky ones, having people around me here at Violin Systems that respect my 30 years of experience driving storage and software solutions. Recently, I’ve been invited to share that experience with a broader audience as an invited member of the Forbes Technology Council.

OK, I am sorry. I couldn’t resist the play on words. This definitely is not a political post.