Today Violin Systems announced the appointment of a new CEO and the acquisition of X-IO Storage. According to the company, the acquisition of X-IO Storage and its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) flash and hybrid storage array product lines allows Violin to meet the needs of a greater variety of customers by providing a broader range of solutions spanning from terabytes to multiple petabytes, with enterprise-class performance, features and reliability. With an expanded product portfolio and the integration of X-IO’s engineering and services teams, Violin is positioned to provide a greater breadth of options to satisfy the exacting needs of its customers.
This has been a year of rebirth, of growth and of tremendous success for Violin,” said CEO Mark Lewis. “That success has been fueled by advancing the already robust feature set of our flagship product, the addition of a product line that complements our existing portfolio of solutions and a team of individuals committed to ensuring customers around the world have the opportunity to add our consistent extreme performance storage to their data centers. With the tremendous success we achieved this past year, Violin is well positioned to dominate the marketplace in 2019 and beyond.”
The X-IO products have been added to a set of already-strong extreme storage solutions that was made even stronger with the introduction of the Violin XVS 8 in October. The Violin XVS 8 offers the best combination of extreme storage performance, low total cost of ownership and high return on investment, enabling organizations to improve the operational efficiency needed to meet both current and future business demands. In addition to providing several key new features with the Violin XVS 8, including NVMe over Fibre Channel, Cloud-Based Predictive Analytics and Selectable Efficiencies by LUN to maximize performance and efficiency for enterprise applications. The company also expanded on its technological innovation this year by being awarded with a new patent for the caching of metadata for deduplicated LUNs.
Behind Violin’s technology advancements was a strengthened core of management additions led by the hiring of CEO Mark Lewis. As an innovator, technologist and industry thought leader, Lewis’ hiring added to the visibility and credibility of Violin as a leading player in performance storage. The company expanded its Board of Directors with Axellio CEO Bill Miller joining with the completion of the X-IO Storage acquisition. Additionally, Violin named Todd Oseth as COO to oversee product development, customer support and services and Gary Lyng as CMO leading company’s marketing and strategy.
Key to the company’s go-to-market expansion were newly-formed channel and technology partnerships in 2018. Violin partnered with Dutch Ridge Consulting Group, LLC to provide both commercial customers and federal agencies with access to the Violin extreme performance storage portfolio. Saturn Business Systems added Violin to its next-generation data center and cloud solutions offerings. Microsoft Managed National System Integrator and Microsoft Cloud Partner of the Year winner VDX now leverages Violin to ensure consistent, low-latency data access while meeting the needs of extreme concurrency. OCS Distribution extended the geographical reach of Violin products to additional regional markets in Russia, while Tara Sistem did the same for territories in Turkey. Additionally, Violin partnered with HARMAN International to accelerate R&D efforts to provide customers advanced features, functionalities, integrations and readiness.
Violin’s efforts and leadership within the industry has also been recognized by industry groups and trade publications. The company was selected among the “Storage Companies to Watch in 2018” in a Frost & Sullivan Stratecast Perspectives & Insight for Executives, highlighted for providing “innovative solutions to data storage challenges” and its ability to retain and regain the confidence of more than 100 large business customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. The Violin Flash Storage Platform 7650 was also named an Editor’s Choice by StorageReview.com based on its extreme performance and consistent low latency achieved during the publications’ extensive application benchmark testing. Additionally noted by Silicon Review as one of the 10 Fastest Growing Storage Companies in 2018.
Violin’s extreme performance platform enables a dramatic infrastructure cost savings and cost avoidance of 40 percent or more by reducing the number of servers and cores needed. Consolidated hardware in the data center means less power and cooling requirements, less management and a reduced need for the number of software and application licenses. With dramatic improvement in application performance, there is an equally dramatic improvement in the experience of the applications’ end users, resulting in improved customer satisfaction. Combined with Violin’s performance advantages, customers are able to realize dramatic competitive advantages while simultaneously saving money.
