Violin Memory prepares all-flash starter kits

All-flash advocate Violin Memory will sell flash memory starter kits to those who are interested in testing the technology in their data centres.

Violin Memory said that the starter kits, which come in two flavours, allow enterprise data centre customers to start their all-flash data centre with as little as 70 TB of capacity.

Directly targeting those who want an easier and, according to Violin Memory, more affordable route into all-flash, the starter kits feature the company’s Flash Storage Platform (FSP) 7700.

“It’s a matter of when, not if, enterprises start making the migration to an all-flash data centre,” reckons Amy Love, Violin’s chief marketing officer.

“It’s Violin’s goal to make that process as smooth as possible.”

The first starter kit, called the Scalable Starter Kit, features the FSP 7700, which claims to deliver up to 2+ million IOPS of performance with consistent sub millisecond latency. The second, called the Stretch Cluster Starter kit, “builds upon Violin’s comprehensive data protection technology to provide data centres with the ability to survive a catastrophic event without business impact”.

It seems everyone at Violin Memory will have their fingers and toes crossed that this starter kit bet pays off.

In January, activist investors posted a public letter to Violin Memory’s management effectively telling the company to find a buyer after stock plummeted.

Violin Memory went public in Autumn 2013 with stock priced at $9, but stocks fell on opening and have declined ever since. This month shares are around 90 cents. The company has a market cap of around $70m.