Violin Memory to make all-flash datacentres a reality for the enterprise

Violin Memory claims its latest piece of software will make it easier for enterprises to build all-flash datacentres that run their business critical apps.

Runs on its Concerto 7000 All-Flash Array, the vendor is rolling out its refreshed enterprise data services software across the globe, today.

The software allows users to take advantage of thin provisioning, asynchronous and synchronous replication, and to generate storage snapshots.

It is claimed the product delivers a lower cost-per-transaction for demanding workloads, resulting in faster application response times, and takes up less floor space than competing arrays.

The 280TB array is designed for use with tier 1 and tier 2 business applications, and according to the company's chief marketing officer Eric Herzog paves the way for enterprises to switch to all-flash storage-based datacentres.

The benefits of doing so, he told IT Pro, include lower power and cooling costs, as well as greater floor space because all-flash arrays can provide a higher performance in a smaller amount of space.

However, despite the relatively higher cost of flash storage, compared to tape or disk, the technology's ability to let users get important work done faster and, therefore more cheaply, is at the heart of the all-flash datacentre's appeal.

"Tape is still the cheapest media, but if you look at it from the holistic perspective of a CIO or IT director, you're not just looking at the cost per gigabyte [anymore], you've got to look at all the costs associated with running a datacentre," he said.

"[When it comes down to the cost of storage] itself, it has traditionally been over-provisioned because you can't get the performance without doing that. Flash takes that need and cost away."

The array is available across the globe from today, and the company has also brought out an upgrade kit so that users of its older 6000 family of all-flash arrays can benefit from the functionality of the enterprise data services software.