Flash player: Remora & Violin Memory

Melbourne-based Remora considers Violin Memory to be a market leader and strong innovator, having signed up in 2013, says Robert Silver, chief executive, Remora

Violin Memory is considered the leader in the emerging all-flash storage industry with the largest in-use install base worldwide. In addition, many key vendors, including Oracle, have used Violin arrays to achieve world-record performance, providing further testament for the quality of the technology.

Violin has a dedicated focus on producing flash-only products, and Remora believes that provides a focused strategy from an R&D perspective to produce the best technology as a leader in the space.

With NextGen Distribution bringing the technology to the Australian marketplace, there is also a compelling opportunity for Remora to be a first mover in Australia to secure marketshare before the partner base grows. This approach has proven successful with other technology vendors within Remora’s portfolio, so we have applied the same principle here. The technology is also a complementary addition to our data centre portfolio, and being a niche player, it eliminates the need to  partner with another large storage vendor that is likely to compete with our existing Oracle storage portfolio.

We signed up as a partner in October 2013. We use NextGen Distribution; other distributors include Digital Networks Australia and Distribution Central. It’s early days yet, and Remora has focused on skilling-up on the technology to provide the best customer experience possible with the technology.

Our solution architects have been fully trained and we are now certified to deliver, which is a key strategy at Remora when we onboard a new vendor to our portfolio. We are working with a number of customers presently that are showing a keen interest in the technology. We are exploring opportunities within our existing customer base, as well as new customers.

For the time being, our key sales focus is around solutions to improve application performance and eliminate latency. There are many database environments out there that could do with a performance boost driven by the in-memory database capabilities that Violin Memory provides. A key benefit of Violin is that they are a market leader in the space, and continue to innovate. On the ground, the Violin team, in conjunction with NextGen in Australia, have been incredibly supportive with a strong focus on partner enablement. This has made onboarding the technology a streamlined process that has enabled Remora to hit the ground running.

Violin’s combined hardware and software focus is driving significant innovation in the emerging flash array technology. Violin’s heterogeneous support for other vendors’ HDD-based storage – facilitated by Maestro Memory Software – enables the technology to be seamlessly deployed within existing storage environments.

Violin is also recognised as one of the world’s fastest and most scalable flash memory arrays.  Extreme scalability is facilitated by Violin’s Symphony software, making it possible to manage petabytes of data on flash through a single pane of glass.

From a hardware perspective, Violin’s strategic relationship with Toshiba, a world leader in NAND flash, enables leading R&D for the future innovation of the technology.