Violin Memory announces the Concerto 7000, which builds on its success with its 6000-series All-Flash Array (AFA). On top of Violin Memory’s proprietary all-flash hardware, this new model adds a comprehensive set of data services focused on business continuity, data protection, scaling, and efficiency.
The Concerto 7000 can now replicate to remote arrays either synchronously or asynchronously over Fibre Channel or IP-based WAN links with built-in WAN optimization. The 7000 also adds snapshot capabilities that enable new backup software integration and can be used as copy-on-write thin writable clones. Consistency groups, also a new feature, are an important but often overlooked way to keep multiple storage volumes in lockstep to guarantee application crash consistency in a disaster recovery/business continuity situation.
On the hardware side, Violin has improved the density of its all-flash array from 70 TB to 280 TB and can now pool capacity across separate storage units, or “shelves.” Customers can also have a single name space across shelves, making management of their arrays much easier. Finally, Violin adds online LUN and array capacity expansion, meaning no downtime to grow their offerings.
Violin and its customers claim massive savings by switching to these all-flash arrays. Not only are they much more power-efficient than traditional disk, but their incredible performance (500,000 sustained IOPS at 0.5 ms latency with a mixed workload) often means fewer servers are needed for a workload. In turn, that means fewer software licenses as well as compound savings for power, cooling, and overall data center space.
Current Violin Memory 6000 customers will be able to upgrade to the 7000 series through a predefined hardware upgrade path.