VIOLIN Insights

For so long, jokes about storing data “in the cloud” were all too common. But cloud computing has become a mainstay in how we do business, and how we store data. So much so, that 74% of tech chief financial officers say that cloud computing has had the most measurable impact on their business, according to the folks at Forbes.

Conversations about enterprise data management used to focus mostly on terabytes, but that conversation is changing.

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.

Back to school day.

Over at Stanford they have a speaker series that has been going on for the last few... decades, called the  Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering Computer Systems Colloquium, known to many simply as EE380. The list of past speakers is as they say, long and distinguished, and includes such industry lightweights as Joy, Lamport, Colwell, Bechtolsheim, Gray, Metcalfe, Gelsinger, Hennessy, Patterson, Brin & Page, Diffie, Mashy, Wolfram, Cerf and Kay. For a mere mortal being invited to give an EE380 talk can be an intimidating experience, which they try to make easier by telling you that there will probably be no more than 50 people in the room, thankfully they didn't mention that 10,000 people will watch the web cast online until after my talk was over. Yes, the other day Bennett and Rowett were added to the list of "past EE380 speakers."

Why did we take disk drives out of servers?  Now we rely on traditional disk array storage and surround it with data center compute.  The industry doubles processing power every 12 to 18 months and Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband now provide 10 – 40Gig bandwidth with very low latencies.  So we have lots of compute and we are swimming in bandwidth but the storage array hasn’t evolved at even 1/100 the pace?  The lack of IO is killing the applications.

Now in 2012 it seems clear that solid state storage will be the solution to balance the network-compute-storage triangle and provide the IO necessary to not only virtualize the easy applications but now tackle the hard (latency-sensitive) IO bound applications that have been fine tuned to run on dedicated servers.