Violin Teams With Toshiba on High-Performance PCIe Cards

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Storage performance is becoming more important as data centers manage massive volumes of information. Two leading players in the storage sector, player Violin Memory and Toshiba have rolled out a strategic alliance to leverage one another’s intellectual property  in NAND flash to deliver a new family of high-performance server-based PCIe cards.

Shifting data center economics at the server layer and shared storage layer has brougth together Toshiba, the inventor of NAND flash, and Violin, a pioneer in memory-based architectures for enterprise storage. The partners say the alliance will result in "pervasive memory-based computing" and mass adoption of an economic memory-based IT infrastructure. The Toshiba alliance enables Violin to have full visibility and control of the supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and R&D efforts at the foundry, chip and software layers.

PCI Express (PCIe) is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard that allows higher data throughput in a smaller footprint.

"The PCIe card market is important to Toshiba’s customers," said Hiroyuki Sato, vice president of Storage Products Division, Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor & Storage Products Company. "Expanding our strategic relationship with Violin Memory will allow us to bring the valuable Violin enterprise IP to a broad range industry leading solutions in our future product offerings."

New PCIe Cards

New third generation PCIe cards use a lightweight driver, expensive host CPU and DRAM resources are not required. The card family includes 1.37TB to 11TB capacities, and form factors that range from low profile to full height and full length. Cards will range from $3/GB to $6/GB list price. With the Velocity family and Violin’s third generation memory-based arrays, Violin now offers a complete portfolio of memory-based storage solutions to address the needs of the widest variety of application workloads.

"Our new focus on PCIe cards will allow both companies to drive radical new economics that lead to the mass adoption of memory-based architectures," said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. "NAND memory is now a requirement at every level from the smart connected device to the core of the cloud and the enterprise data center. Violin’s combined portfolios continue our leadership across the evolving memory-based solution market."