VIOLIN Insights

Flash storage for enterprise storage systems is quickly becoming the storage entity of choice for many businesses-- especially those who have high-performance needs, or those who use apps for things like accessing or storing to databases or operating artificial intelligence.

Whether your company runs on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, MySQL, IBM Informix, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB, your database is a complex machine that relies on maintenance to function well. A database health check is essential to identify problematic sections so you can enhance your database in the areas that aren’t operating at their fullest potential.

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.

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.

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