Postcards from Storageland: Three Years At Violin

A few weeks ago, in what seems to be a truly modern phenomenon, I became aware that it was my third anniversary of joining Violin after I noticed a number of people congratulating me on LinkedIn. In many ways it feels like I’ve already been here for a lifetime, but it was only twelve months ago I was trying to think of a suitable flash-based pun for the title of an article just like this one. This year I opted out of the “Three years in a flash” headline, it seemed a bit too lame. Those NAND-based puns were only ever a flash in the pan.*

So what’s happened in the three years since I joined Violin? Well, quite a lot. When I signed up in early 2012 Violin was pioneering the flash array industry – and when I say pioneering I mean that, unlike in today’s crowded AFA market, it was a pretty lonely place. The only other all-flash array vendor with a presence was Texas Memory Systems (TMS), but they had seemingly gone into hibernation in the markets I had exposure to (as it turned out they were looking for a buyer, which they found in the form of IBM).

I was one of the first employees in EMEA, part of a business which was rapidly expanding due to a global reseller agreement with HP for our 3000 series array. The main enemy was the status quo – monolithic disk arrays from EMC, IBM, HP, HDS etc, perhaps with a smattering of SSDs to try and alleviate the terrible performance of random I/O. With the 3000 on HP’s price list and no real competition to worry about it seemed like the world was there for the taking. Time to pay of the mortgage.

Were we overconfident? Guilty of hubris, perhaps? We must have alienated a few people in the industry because I know not everyone felt sympathy for what happened next.

Pride Cometh Before A Fall

With hindsight, the $2.35 billion that HP paid for 3PAR meant it was unlikely to continue using Violin as a strategic product. HP may have a history of write downs, but it simply couldn’t justify OEMing the new 6000 series array with 3PAR still on the books so… it didn’t.

Meanwhile, EMC purchased a company that hadn’t yet shipped a product, IBM did its deal with TMS, Cisco bizarrely purchased Whiptail (which now appears to be suspended as a product) and a number of SSD-based flash array startups (e.g. Pure Storage) appeared on the market.

All of which meant that, when Violin went to IPO, things didn’t exactly go to plan. In fact, it eventually resulted in a change of management and the introduction of a new CEO and management team who have systematically transformed the company over the last year. But at the time, it felt like a roller coaster.

So why am I reminiscing about the bad times? Partly because I don’t want to gloss over the past, but also because I genuinely think that Violin has had to do a lot of growing up in the last year or so – and that’s a good thing. When I look at other flash vendors throwing FUD at each other, getting into legal disputes over employees or burning bridges with their channel partners to try and get their pre-IPO books look more attractive… I can’t help a wry smile. Youth, eh? Some people still have harsh lessons to learn.

From Niche to Platform

This year, on the third anniversary of my joining Violin, we announced an important new product – the 7000 series Flash Storage Platform. Until the FSP, Violin had generally competed in the niche performance-optimized market – what some people call Tier 0 – where the single most important attribute is… well, performance (think database workloads). We’ve been pretty successful there, mainly because the 6000 series was (and still is) unbelievably fast, but also partly because much of the competition competes lower down in the capacity-optimized market (where price per GB is key – think VDI workloads). But we also attracted a surprising amount of criticism for the lack of certain Data Services features, such as deduplication (a feature that I’ve never coveted for database workloads).

But with the Flash Storage Platform, Violin – and flash in general – is moving into a new, larger and much more demanding market: Tier 1 primary storage. This is the big playground where all the major disk array vendors are desperately trying to stem the losses from their legacy SAN products. It’s also a market which is nearly 15 times larger than the one we used to operate in. And most importantly, it’s the one where you need to be able to deliver on all three requirements of the Primary Storage Trinity:

• Performance (high IOPS and low latency)
• Data Services (lots of features, fully integrated)
• Capacity Optimization (low $/GB price)

By complete coincidence, this product launch also coincides with the end of the Understanding Flash section of my blog series on Storage for DBAs (when I started the flashdba blog it was aimed at database administrators, but over time the intended audience has expanded to anyone with an interest in flash storage).

With that in mind, in the next set of posts I’ll be turning my attention to the concepts and architecture of All Flash Arrays. What defines an AFA? What needs to be considered when designing one? And why doesn’t it make sense to stuff a load of SSDs into an existing disk array in the hope that it will deliver the performance of All Flash?

This is a really exciting time to be working in the storage industry – there’s lots to do and a massive opportunity to embrace. Because of this, the blog posts haven’t been coming as quickly as I’d hoped. But I still have much I want to talk about… so don’t worry, the next one will be back in a flash.**

* I really will stop making flash-based puns now

** Apart from this one