Violin Systems

The Violin Systems LLC company (before Violin Memory) locates the headquarters to San Jose, the State of California.

Business in Russia

2018: Resumption of work of representation in Russia

The Violin Systems company, producer a flash DWH of an industrial class, announced on October 10, 2018 resumption of work of representation in Russia. As declared in the companies, the decision on activation of work of Violin in the market of the Russian Federation — the next significant step to program implementations of strategic development of business in the region recognized by the company one of the most perspective.

Andrey Kuchinsky having long-term work experience in the industry of storage systems headed the Russian representative office.

Resumption of work of representative office of Violin Systems in the Russian Federation turned out to be consequence of growth of interest in high-performance storage systems at the companies and the organizations in the country and also an active position of the company Violin in expansion of presence in Russia. Promptly growing number of the business applications needing high-performance infrastructure of storage of the corporate level expands also a scope of the products Violin Systems. Being a pioneer in the field, the company proposes to customers solutions with the advanced technical characteristics and provides them with all services of storage of the corporate level – replication and synchronization of data between systems, creation of copies of data, deduplication and compression.

Delivering solutions of Violin Systems to the Russian canal is performed by OCS Distribution, IT distributor of the domestic market. For October, 2018 the company has representations in 27 cities of Russia, works with 8500 partners and locates as a team of the specialists providing to partners before - and after-sale support in the direction of solutions Violin, and demonstration samples of storage systems Violin Systems.

2014: Opening of representation in Moscow

In 2014 the company opened the representation in To Moscow and together with the system integrator "Croc" delivered the DWH for banks "Raiffeisen Bank" and "Renaissance Credit".

History

2018: X-IO Storage purchase

The Violin Systems LLC company announced on October 16, 2018 agreement signature about intentions with X-IO Technologies according to which it purchases the division of X-IO Storage which developed an intelligent system of storage (ISE) of data all-flash, hybrid model and DWH on hard drives. Financial terms of transaction are not disclosed. It is supposed that end will be complete within 30 days.

According to representatives of Violin Systems, the company will save not only the products X-IO and a team of engineers, but also process and the organization of service of the IO X-systems. It guarantees that customers (for October, 2018 the install base X-IO contains more than 8 thousand used arrays) will continue to get support and world-class service. Violin purpose — to integrate experience with clients of two companies, using the advanced practicians of the organizations.

Besides, the company is going to add arrays of X-IO ISE to the product line a flash systems. It will allow to offer the market a broad spectrum of solutions storage volume — from terabyte to several petabyte with a performance, characteristics and reliability of the Enterprise level. Violin Systems intends to integrate the technology of extreme performance with the solutions X-IO for providing new opportunities of growth to the organizations as small and medium business, and to large corporate structures.

X-IO Technologies, in turn, announced renaming into Axellio Inc. and intention to be focused on the solutions for peripheral calculations (edge computing) and hyper convergent infrastructure.

The Russian market of storage systems follows universal trends, thanks to growth of a role of IT in ensuring development of the companies and enterprises more and more, and for the IT many organizations became this engine of growth. Violin Systems was succeeded not only to create high-performance storage systems, but also to provide support of all corporate services of work with data when preserving competitive cost of solutions. Adding of technologies, experts and service the practician of X-IO creates a complete solution portfolio of storage for the Russian companies and the organizations practically of any size, all for whom technologies from the pioneer in the field of creation of the high-performance systems and the developer of scalable intellectual arrays of data storage are required — the chief representative of Violin Systems in Russia, the CIS and the countries of Baltika Andrey Kuchinsky considers.

2017: Acquisition by Quantum Partners fund

In April, 2017 the Violin Memory company was purchased by the American investment fund Quantum Partners LP that served further revival of the company under the name Violin Systems.

2016: Beginning of carrying out insolvency proceeding

At the end of 2016 Violin Memory announced producer of solid-state storage systems the beginning of carrying out insolvency proceeding of the company.

In recent years revenues of Violin fell because of sharp competition aggravation in the market solid-state DWH to which at first there were startups using in the systems new generation cheaper high-speed SSD, and then and the largest players of the market of storage systems (EMC HPE NetApp Hitachi i IBM). Besides corporate customers when choosing solid-state DWH are not guided only by access rate to data any more, but consider also such indicators on which the products Violin strongly lost to competitors as scalability and ability to integrate in existing IT infrastructure the enterprises.

In 2014 the company tried to come to dynamically developing sector of solid-state DWH of an initial class, having released FSP7250, however sales of this array could not compensate sharp reduction of revenues of Violin from the systems of the senior class. In the last "a magic quadrant" of Gartner, devoted solid-state by systems, Violin appeared among niche players and received the lowest mark among all vendors.

Since the end of 2014 company executives tried to find for it the buyer, however in March, 2015 stopped this search and started restructuring during which the personnel of the company were reduced from 437 to 82 people^[1].

2015: A flash arrays for all applications

For 2015 Violin Memory offers a flash arrays which are intended for all applications: databases, analytics and virtual environments – many times increase performance, availability and reliability. A flash DWH can be used in IT infrastructure together with disk arrays where the flash array undertakes functions operational DWH, and disk – archive. Data transfer from disk DWH on a flash platform of Violin Memory gives essential advantages: acceleration up to 20 times of execution of business applications, economy of TSO up to 80% for service of business applications and infrastructure in general, spaces in DPC, the electric power. Migration on Violin Memory allows to save significantly on the server park, having increased useful utilization of the existing capacities and also to cut down expenses on licenses and technical support of the industrial DBMS licensed on processors as after transition to a flash customers note reduction of need for computing resources.

2014: Violin Flash Memory Array

For 2014 the Violin Memory company with the headquarters in Mountain View (California) is a pioneer in development of high-performance storage systems on a basis a flash memory which are designed to raise performance of DWH to the level of high-speed applications, servers and networks.

The Violin Flash Memory Array systems are designed for use of opportunities a flash memory at each level of system architecture (since chips of memory and finishing with data arrays) to provide the high performance of work of business and critical applications, virtual environments and solutions of the class Big Data in corporate data centers. The Violin Flash Memory Array systems are created especially for ensuring steady and reliable work, they are scaled to hundreds terabyte and millions of input-output operations per second – at a low and predictable delay time.

While producers of traditional DWH went on a conservative way, integrating a flash in the form of SSD disks into the architecture of storage systems created in the 90th years for work with disk carriers and imposing significant restrictions for a flash memory, Violin Memory created "from scratch" essentially new solution, work on which took several years and led more than 400 patents to receiving. Failure from use of SSD and legacy disk architecture allowed Violin Memory to construct the storage system optimized under a flash chips and having parameters of performance and response time, unattainable for traditional arrays.

"The arrays of memory of Violin constructed entirely on a basis a flash technologies are suitable for large-scale virtualization of jobs, placement of the high-loaded databases, accomplishment of advanced analytical queries and other high-performance tasks. In this case a system is more profitable than normal DWH, at the same time it can be used together with already existing disk arrays, much increasing overall effectiveness of IT infrastructure. Besides the solution Violin saves the place: a system of the size of a box of a dresser provides performance of several server cabinets with height in human growth. To dispel all doubts, many companies carry out the assessment of the Violin Array systems at themselves on the platform. Several organizations already stand in a queue for pilot testing on the platform for performance upward potential assessment, including banks and large transport company", – Andrey Tyshchenko, the associate director of department of computing systems of CROC company comments.

In recent years in the market of storage systems there was no significant technology change therefore an exit a flash technologies became the revolution which opened the road to the young technological companies.

Success of the company was caused by creation of a solid-state array with the maximum efficiency a flash chip. A flash DWH of Violin Memory the high speed of input-output (to 1 million IOPS) distinguishes, low response time (150 microseconds), 44 useful terabytes in small form-factor 3U with a possibility of expansion to several hundred terabyte and high reliability of the class High-End. At the expense of a low response clients of Violin Memory repeatedly accelerate applications – from two to 20 times and reduce costs of computer center to 80%. This solution is the most mature in the market and is issued already in fourth generation.

2011: Output of completely solid-state arrays

In 2011 Violin brought completely solid-state arrays intended for service of business and critical applications to the market.

2005: Education

In 2005 with assistance of a number of large investors, including SAP, Juniper Networks and the inventor a flash memory – Toshiba, formed Violin Memory (Violin Technologies) which soon turned into the influential player of the market of DWH.

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