Violin Memory
American computer storage company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Violin Systems, formerly Violin Memory, was a private American company based in Silicon Valley, California, that designed and manufactured computer data storage products.
 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2005[1] |
| Headquarters | , |
Key people | CEO: Mark Lewis, COO: Todd Oseth, CMO: Gary Lyng, SVP Worldwide Field Operations |
| Owner | Quantum Group of Funds |
| Website | violinsystems |
Corporate history
The company was founded in 2005 as Violin Technologies by Donpaul Stephens and Jon Bennett in Iselin, New Jersey.[citation needed] Series A financing valued over $10 million was raised in 2010. Two more rounds of financing in 2011 raised an additional $75 million. Corporate investors included Juniper Networks and Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC). It was based in Mountain View, California around this time.
Series D financing of $80 million in March 2012 was led by SAP Ventures (arm of SAP AG), and included Highland Capital, GSV and others. The reported valuation was over $800 million.[2][3]
Violin Memory's initial public offering in September 2013, raised $162 million at a price of $9 a share.[4] Its stock price dropped to $2 a share after its largest partner, Hewlett Packard, became a competitor and due to concerns of how quickly it was spending money.[4] The company experienced losses of $34 million the following year and the board called for the resignation of the CEO.[5] Additionally, five shareholder lawsuits were filed against the company, alleging it did not disclose the financial impact expected from a federal shutdown.[4] In December 2013, the company terminated CEO Basile,[6] replacing him with Kevin DeNuccio in February 2014.[7]
The New York Stock Exchange de-listed Violin Memory shares in October 2016 because its market capitalization had fallen below $15 million.[8] A few days later, it changed to be traded on the OTC Markets Group exchange OTCQX, using the same VMEM symbol.[9] In November 2016, it was valued at $3.7 million.[7] On December 14, 2016, Violin Memory filed for Chapter 11 Federal Bankruptcy protection.[10]
On April 24, 2017, Violin announced in a press release that they had emerged from bankruptcy, and had been purchased by Quantum Partners LP, a private investment fund managed by Soros Fund Management LLC.[11]
On October 16, 2018, Violin Systems released the statement that it had agreed to acquire the storage business of X-IO Technologies and in conjunction with the transaction X-IO has renamed itself as Axellio as its new company name.[12]
In 2020, Violin Systems was bought out by StorCentric, Inc.[13]
Technology
Violin does not use solid-state drives (SSD), but instead uses a proprietary design referred to as flash fabric architecture (FFA).[14] The FFA technology consists of a mesh of NAND flash dies, modules[15] that organize the mesh of flash dies, and a proprietary switched architecture for fault tolerance.[16] In September 2011, Violin announced the 6000 series all-silicon shared flash memory storage arrays.[17]
vMOS[18][19] is Violin Memory's software layer that integrates with the FFA to provide data protection, management and connectivity to the host.
Products
Violin extreme performance storage platform, XVS 8 released October 4, 2018.
The Violin 7000 series includes application aware snapshots, continuous data protection, synchronous replication, asynchronous replication and metro cluster functionality.[20][21][22]
On December 1, 2015, the Violin Memory FSP 7250 and 7600 were announced. The Violin FSP 7250 was marketed as an entry level point product.[23]
The 7700[24] series can scale up to ten 6000 or 7000 series arrays for up to 700TB of raw capacity or 3.5 PB with deduplication[25]
The Violin 6000 series[26] all flash arrays include the 6600, 6200 and 6100. The 6600[27] is based on SLC flash and offers 17.5TB of capacity. The 6200[28] offers flash performance at capacities from 17.5 to 70TB. The 6100[29] is a smaller array at lower price of entry with a pay as you grow[30] option.