NYSE fed up of Violin's bum notes, threatens stock market ejection

vSANs and 10GigE?

vSANs have been around for a decade and 10GigE equally long. Most servers these days are shipping with multiple 2-16x 40GbE ... anything less is called a PC. As for vSANs, Let's be fair, vSANs are SCSI based block based storage which on the very best of days might be able to scale to 25Gb/sec because MPIO is an after-thought in SCSI which kinda works. Therefore unless you can get a single wavelength with greater capacity, you're going to have a bottle neck. Using SMBv3 or NFS (on anything other than VMware) scaled beautifully past single link and can easily scale to terabits per second.

So... then we have Violin... I came to comment to ask what it is that they have that makes them special. SSD isn't really particularly interesting anymore. I just built a fairly cheap data center storage solution for my personal lab. It contains 8 servers with 12 cores and 96 gigs of RAM each... for storage, each server has a PCIe riser that holds 4xM.2 PCIe cards which each have an average throughput of about 2 GB/sec. I'm only using little 256gig modules for a yield of 256GB raw storage per server. By employing Windows Server 2012 R2 with Replica, Dedup, etc... as well as Starwind vSAN to boot older systems, I can get a sustained transfer rate measured in hundreds of gigabits per second while surviving two full node outages and function beautifully until 4 nodes fail. Each system has an additional 4x6TB hard drives for near-line storage for a yield of approximately 6TB per server of additional raw capacity.

The total cost of this solution is measured as a few thousand pounds per node. I didn't even build this for price. I built this for ease of reliability, management, scalability and performance.Compared to NetApp, EMC, Hitatchi and a few others (I'd mention HP, but why bother), performance was mangitudes faster, scalability was massively higher. When I go into production, I'll use decent servers, not these junkers I picked up on eBay for 500 pounds each and added storage and networking to.

So... where the heck does Violin fit? They seem to have a SDS option, but they provide so little information on it it's as if they're a company hell-bent on being the experts on a dying market.