Violin's new 6000 Series array

Violin Memory released a new line of all-flash-memory storage arrays yesterday, but my recent discussion with CEO Don Basile was all about the company’s future, which he said includes an upcoming IPO and possibly a flash acquisition or two. Fellow solid-state startup Fusion-io is flying high after going public in June, so now’s probably the time for Violin to really make a splash and establish its name.

Basile said his company is planning an IPO for the first or second quarter of 2012, a move that makes sense if you buy into Basile’s view of the world. Unlike Fusion-io, which sells flash components that plug into servers, Violin sells full-on storage arrays consisting of flash memory. Violin wants to disrupt the multi-billion-dollar storage and transaction-processing markets, whereas as Fusion-io is more of a complementary play in those areas.

That’s not a slight against Fusion-io —  Basile was CEO there before coming to Violin — it’s just an assessment of the state of the flash-memory-in-the-data-center market. The thinking no doubt is that if Fusion-io can succeed as a public company, the potentially more lucrative Violin can too.

But Violin has one big obstacle in its quest to dominate the flash-storage world. That would be a list of well-funded startups such as Nimbus Data Systems, Pure Storage, Nimble Storage and others that are pushing their own flash-storage arrays and are marketing themselves around prices that rival hard disk drives (see Nimbus’s chart to the right).

By contrast, Violin typically sells high-end gear targeting high-end customers. For example, it has a deal with HP for a massive online transaction processing systems that rival Oracle’s pricey Exadata appliance.

Basile is fine with this arrangement, though. Positioning Violin as a whole-system vendor (Violin owns its IP from chips to software, Basile said) against software companies that do little hardware innovation. (Although, Nimbus Data Systems, at least, confirmed to me that it doesn’t OEM its hardware.) Right now, he said, Violin focuses on the Global 5000, whereas other flash-storage vendors tend to focus on the mid-market. Ultimately, though their paths might cross, he acknowledged.

At that point — if Violin does want to court smaller accounts — Basile said he thinks its current product lineup will do the trick, but he’d be open to buying someone if need be. All the flash activity means there’s a real market for the technology, he noted, and that means there’s some good innovation going on outside of Violin.

Basile probably has the cash to make such a move if need be. Violin has taken in million in venture capital this year alone, along with 0 million in debt financing, and Basile thinks the company could do 0 million in revenue next year. That would double the 0 million it’s projected to earn in 2011. A successful IPO, of course, would put even more money in the bank.

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Today is a big day for flash-storage startup Nimbus Data Systems: It’s rolling out its second-generation platform and it gets to announce online auction giant eBay as a major customer. In fact, eBay has deployed a non-trivial 100TB of Nimbus gear. Have we finally reached the inflection point for primary flash storage?

Traditionally, flash has been used as a cache layer either within storage arrays or within servers themselves to speed delivery of hot data. The latter model is how Fusion-io’s flash components are delivered into data centers.

Recently, though, there has been a strong movement toward using flash for storing all an organization’s primary data, not just the hot stuff that needs special attention. This has been spurred by lower prices for flash memory at the component level, as well as by a greater understanding of the energy savings and and price-per-transaction savings that flash can provide. Flash might require a bit more capital investment upfront, but it pays off in the long run.

eBay is a prime example of the benefits of flash. Nimbus Data CEO Thomas Isakovich told me that eBay had only 2.5TB of flash installed six months ago before recently upgrading to 100TB. Within the PayPal division where Nimbus is deployed, Isakovich said eBay has cut power costs by 78 percent, cut its rack space by half and is able to better meet performance demand overall by spinning up virtual machines even faster.

Virtualization, actually, is another driving force behind the uptick in flash interest lately. Its benefits around consolidation and flexibility also bring performance overhead for storage operations.

As for the Nimbus gear, it comes in 2TB, 5TB and 10TB chunks and is scalable up to 250TB. It uses ELC NAND, which the company claims is 10 times more durable than standard MLC NAND, and runs a specially designed file system and software set. Among the features are advanced compression, deduplication, replication and thin-provisioning capabilities.

Isakovich claims that when one factors in lower file-system performance overhead and the fact that Nimbus doesn’t charge a licensing fee for its software, his company’s systems can actually come in at a lower price per gigabyte than spinning disks. His math must not be too far off: Nimbus has more than 200 customers just over a year into selling its product, and reached profitability on the back of angel funding alone.

Nimbus Data is just part of a greater market, though, which is why the notion of mass flash adoption seems more realistic than ever before. There’s also Nimble Storage and Tintri serving small enterprises with a hybrid flash-and-disk approach, Violin Memory serving the highest-performance customers, and even SolidFire serving cloud providers as its target market. And they’ve all been raising lots of money and building their customer bases.

Add in the recent surge of flash support by mega storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, and customers soon won’t be able to escape the flash onslaught.

Isakovich thinks Nimbus Data can become a billion company — “the next NetApp” — by capturing the hype around flash and maintaining its competitive pricing model versus hard disk drives. That’s a long way off, and Nimbus has plenty of competition, but someone has to make that money.

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Flash-storage component manufacturer Fusion-io  is trading well above its initial public offering price, signaling that investors believe solid-state drives might actually live up to their promise to displace large quantities of spinning disks in enterprise data centers. Fusion-io’s IPO has been characterized by mostly increasing prices — the company suggested an opening range of – on Tuesday, actually priced at (it opened at ) this morning, and has been trading between and all morning.

If Fusion-io can maintain its opening stock price and current volume (storage leader EMC, by comparison, has been trading at just under today) despite a relative lack of reliable recurring revenue, it should mean even bigger things for the greater solid-state ecosystem. Fusion-io presently plays in a relatively small segment of the addressable market for flash, in that it sells flash-packed components that plug into servers and act as a high-performance cache to spare applications the need to call the backend storage array. It presently has OEM deals with IBM, HP and Dell to include its components in their servers.

But greater demand for and excitement around flash also means big things for startups such as Violin Memory, which sells flash-packed storage arrays meant to replace hard disk drives for primary storage. Violin has raised a boatload of cash thus far, including million just this week, and CEO Don Basile thinks it can hit the 0 million revenue mark this year thanks to a perfect storm of price-performance improvements and overall SSD excitement. The key to selling more flash storage is a lower price, Basile told me earlier this week, and that will come as Fusion-io’s and Violin’s big-time server-and-storage-vendor partners solidify their dedication to flash and start selling flash-optimized systems at scale.

Fusion-io’s success also should be good news for a handful of startups selling software designed to optimize solid-state deployments. These include the still stealth-mode SolidFire, which raised million in February, and the just-emerged VeloBit. These companies can’t sell their software until companies have invested in flash hardware. Speaking of hardware, NAND flash manufacturers such as Samsung, Toshiba and Micron have to be happy about the appetite for Fusion-io stock, too, as they’re the key to the whole supply chain.

Presumably Fusion-io’s shareholders are happy about the IPO price, too. At the opening price of a share, as of the company’s S-1 filing:

• CEO David Flynn beneficially owns 6,619,836 shares worth 5.8 million.
• CMO and EVP Rick White beneficially owns 5,151,174 shares worth .9 million.
• New Enterprise Associates, which invested .7 million in Fusion-io, beneficially owns 25,935,930 shares worth 28 million.
• Lightspeed Venture Partners, which invested million in Fusion-io, beneficially owns 8,823,741 shares worth 7.7 million.

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Apple 13.3″ MacBook Air 1.86GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB Flash Storage, NVIDIA GeForce 320M (Z0JG-4GB)

1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, 128GB Flash Storage, NVIDIA GeForce 320M, 13.3″ LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1, SD card slot, FaceTime camera, Built-in battery, Precision aluminum unibody.

This Apple computer has been upgraded over the base Apple model by Apple in their factory. As a result, it comes with the standard Apple computer warranty. The base Apple computer model this upgraded model was built upon was MC503LL/A.

The Apple upgrades specific to this model are:

Memory increase from 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM to 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM.

Rating: (out of reviews)

List Price:

Price: $ 1,394.00

US $8.49 (0 Bid) End Date: Saturday Feb-11-2012 15:08:51 PST Buy It Now for only: US $9.35 Bid now | Buy it now | Add to watch list

Oh, component breakdowns. How we love ‘em. Let’s talk about the iPad.

The $499 iPad breaks-down something like this:

• Touchscreen – $95
• Apple A4 CPU – $26.80
• 16GB flash storage – $29.50
• Aluminum rear panel – $26.80
• Broadcom Bluetooth, WiFi chip – $8.05
• TI controller chip – $1.80
• Ciruss Logic audio chip – $1.2

All that, combined with other pieces of hardware and bezel parts add up to $260 per iPad. That’s slightly more than iSuppli’s preliminary $229 estimate reported back in early February. The 32GB and 64GB chips of course cost more with the 32GB estimated at $59 and the 64GB chip at $118.

Don’t put too much weight into this estimate as it only accounts to for the cost of the hardware and not the time and resources that went into developing and marketing the iPad. We’ve heard that Apple has been toiling away at this thing for years, but the company doesn’t seem to have any issues selling it so they shouldn’t have an issue making it back.

I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it sounds interesting. Chinese manufacturer Creation Tech is selling a 7 inch ultra mobile PC for $65. The specs aren’t very impressive, but for that kind of money what do you expect?

I guess it’d be ok for doing your computing in the cloud, but the CTEB7G wouldn’t be useful for much more then internet browsing. The thing is powered by a VIA 533MHz processor, has 128mb of RAM, 2GB of flash storage, and sports an 800×600 display. You’ll also have built in wifi, 3 USB 2.0 ports, and it runs Windows CE 6.0. Bad news though, this particular machine is only available in China at the present time. Perhaps it’ll show up at your local drugstore in those wire bins near the check stand. Or WalMart.