Greening the Data Center is dominated in marketing messages by the big brands - Intel, HP, IBM, and EMC/VMware. But, some of the greenest solutions are coming from small companies that introduce disruptive technologies. As many of you know the Storage Systems can be big power users in the data center, requiring special power distribution for the high power density which then requires extra cooling. Many of you would like to throw those storage systems out if you could.

How about if for the same cost as an EMC or NetApp storage solution you could consume 80% less power, shrink a rack of storage to 3U of space, and improve the server performance potentially removing 70% of the servers? Violin memory announced their new storage solution.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — May 25, 2010 — Violin Memory, Inc., provider of the world’s fastest and most scalable memory arrays, today announced the availability of the Violin Memory 3200 Flash Memory Array. The Violin 3200 is a redundant, modular 3U memory array that scales from 500GB to 10 Terabyte SLC NAND Flash and provides the industry’s best price/performance attributes using patent-pending Flash RAID technology.

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“We are delighted by the customer response to the Violin 3000 series and our new Memory Array data center equipment category.” said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “The aggregation of flash modules into a Memory Array allows much higher performance and spike-free latency for enterprise applications – Database, data warehousing, VMware as well as custom applications all benefit from the order of magnitude price/performance improvements of Violin’s flash array technology.”

Versus SSD memory solution that are installed in PCIe slots like Virident and Fusion-IO which are useful for solutions like memcache, the Violin Memory solution looks like a NAS storage device and can improve the performance of a wider range of solutions like good old relational databases.

Here is a top view of the 3000 Series Violin Memory storage appliance.

BTW, a bunch of the exec team at Violin Memory came from Fusion-IO, so if you were looking at Fusion-IO you should think about adding Violin memory to your eval list. Violin Memory has the potential to be used in a lot more scenarios.

The Violin Memory is disruptive to the Server License model for those who make money on the number of processors, so you can expect resistance to a NAND Flash memory array.

I'll be meeting with Violin Memory tomorrow, so I should have more technical details in a future post.