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back to article New 64TiB Violin byte bucket is a load of Tosh: 19nm flash in a 3U box

Violin Memory has unveiled its highest capacity array, the 6264, that packs 64TiB of flash into a 3U box - and it uses 19nm MLC NAND chips from investor and manufacturer Toshiba. The new array can apparently hit 750,000 mixed read/write 4096-byte IOPS; the earlier 6232 (which stores 32TiB) does 500,000. In other respects the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IBM / TMS FlashSystem 820?

    Hasn't the TMS / IBM FlashSystem 820 offered 30 TiB RAW / 20TB Useable in RAID 5 in just 1U for ages now?

    I don't even work for IBM and knew that!

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: IBM / TMS FlashSystem 820?

      But you do, Rick B. Creating a throw-away account to post someone about TMS. Aren't we clever!

      Violin's strategy of not using SSDs is smart. There is a need for a different abstraction for flash versus the cartridge approach that disk went with. The question I have is how do they handle hot swap (same question with the other non-SSD vendor (Skyera). Is SAS the right answer for connectivity or would it be PCIe (NVM Express) or something else?

      BTW any comments on the $/GB versus the competition. Pure keeps talking about their $/GB being in the disk range (can't verify as I haven't gotten any quotes from them). Skyera is open kimono with their $/GB. What about Violin Memory?

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      1. ByteMe
        Reply Icon
        Meh

        Re: IBM / TMS FlashSystem 820?

        Violin uses PCIe and VIMMs are fully hot swappable.

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  2. Rick B

    IBM / TMS FlashSystem 820?

    Hasn't the TMS / IBM FlashSystem 820 offered 30 TiB RAW / 20TB Useable in RAID 5 in just 1U for ages now?

    I don't even work for IBM and knew that!

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What people know -

    VIMM - Is for Violin Intelligent Memory Module, the intelligence being a programmable FPGA placed on each storage module.

    TMS has been doing a lot of things for a lot years prior to IBM buying them, and given their product roadmap they have just reached the RAS (reliability, serviceability and accessibility) feature set that Violin started out with in 2005. So after all most 20+ years and bunch of money from IBM, TMS is still ~7+ years behind Violin.

    Anonymous works best - when you mark the box before hand. But if you accidentally post as your self you can mark the the post for deletion.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More than isolated terabyte islands

    Two interesting announcements. The new 6264 puts 64 TB in 3RU. I agree with the author that Skyera currently ships an array with 44 TB in 1 RU. So you do the math ... 132 TB in 3RU. Even with it's current skyHawk products - if you are looking for capacity this is more than double. The second is a significant pre-announcement from Skyera of a 500 TB 1RU array that came this week. Either way 64 TB in 3RU seems weak. Finally, Skyera supports something absent in their competitor - native deduplication which when coupled with compression can bring down the cost per gigabyte to as low as 49 cents according to Skyera (they claim $1.99 without dedup/compression) - it changes the whole industry. One last point on Skyera - they support NFS.

    As for SolidFire - they seem to have an excellent story to tell as well that puts them in a better position with regards to virtualization and clouds. Let's leave aside the religion around SSD versus flash modules - in some ways it is a red herring. One can certainly make a passionate argument on behalf of flash modules being more efficient - but SolidFire offers something of real value if you are going to use the array within a virtualized environment or cloud - they do quality of service. You know, like real resource management on IO. Just like you do resource management with CPU, memory and network bandwidth - you can do it on IOPS. If you are interested in virtualized environments this makes a whole lot of sense. One more point they can meter it and establish IOPS thresholds (max, min, burst). It should also be mentioned that managing multiple arrays via a user interface should not be confused with nor is it a substitute for real clustering. SolidFire allows each node to join into a cluster when they are added - instead of five separate arrays that operate as completely separate entities - you can look at one cluster. This is important and differentiating when compared to some of the other competitors like the 6264. Finally, like Skyera, they understand the value of native dedup in a virtualized environment. It can save tremendous amounts of flash storage.

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