Violin With Symantec for Flash-Optimized Data Management Capabilities

Violin Memory, Inc. announced a suite of data management capabilities for its all-flash Memory Arrays, offering enterprises a tier 1 storage solution that requires no compromises between speed, scale, reliability and cost.

During the past nine months, Violin has been collaborating with Symantec Corp. to build flash-optimized software including snapshots, cloning, deduplication, replication and thin provisioning into Violin’s product portfolio.

"Violin is at the forefront of offering tier 1 storage that is built from the ground up," said Narayan Venkat, VP of products for Violin Memory. "We have been delivering storage at the speed of memory with disk array prices, and now, we’ve partnered with Symantec to build a comprehensive flash-optimized data management suite that extends the benefits of speed and scale to data protection, disaster avoidance and storage efficiency."

As companies consolidate their data centers through increased levels of virtualization – whether it’s to scale virtual desktop infrastructures or virtualize business critical apps – they are constrained by legacy storage infrastructures that force them to choose between storage performance, economics and data protection. Violin’s flash Memory Arrays with built-in data management capabilities from Symantec allow businesses to move beyond the typical 40-50% virtualized infrastructure to 70-80%. End users can now put business critical applications on virtual machines without sacrificing IOPS, latency, economics, data protection and reliability.

"Symantec has been delivering data management and replication solutions for over a decade," said Don Angspatt, VP of product management, Storage and Availability Management Group for Symantec. "The opportunity to work with Violin, a leader in flash storage arrays, was exciting, and the effort to optimize our technologies over the last year will provide enterprises a unique solution that will further enable the consolidation and virtualization of their data centers."

According to Gerrit Schutte, a long-time Violin proponent and the senior VP and CIO for ConAgra Foods, Inc., "Given Symantec’s proven abilities to back up and replicate data at significant scale and speed, this expanded relationship with Violin Memory goes a long way toward making a compelling case for large enterprise clients to seriously consider use of both vendors."

Gartner’s research VP Joseph Unsworth agrees: "Business critical applications, virtualization and big data analytics all require performance scalability driven by improvedend user experiences or the need to transact faster for real-time decision-making. However, when customers sought economic, reliability or scalability aspects from solutions, they have often been incomplete and ultimately come at the expense of the business. Getting performance scaling and data protection in an economical offering is a necessity."