Violin Memory, a world leader in providing flash storage solutions for enterprises, is adding deduplication and compression features to its Concerto memory array controller product.

This move will cut the cost per GB of the product, as well as making a more competitive product in an already competitive marketplace.

"Violin Memory's new Concerto 2200 array update with inline deduplication capabilities bring value to customers with performance and capacity improvements for workload demands," said Randy Kerns, senior strategist for the Evaluator Group. "Combining the tier one all-flash array performance with features for scalable virtualization implementations, Violin has a solution for enterprises to improve their economics."

The Concerto 2200 Data Reduction appliance will be a supplement to the Violin 6000 or 7000 by being able to support NFS. The 2200 is also able to connect to Violin's all-flash arrays via a Fiber Channel, and host via Ethernet.

The addition to inline deduplication and compression provides up to 672TB of storage by offering a data reduction rate of 6:1. Users are able to control deduplication because of the fact that it does not always need to be on.

"We see competitors who offer 'always on' deduplication and compression, but we know that, depending on the customers' workloads, performance may suffer as a result of the 'always on' approach," said Eric Herzog, Violin CMO and senior vice president of alliance.

What this means is that having deduplication can lower the performance of a Violin flash arrays' performance.

The addition of these features is likely to help enterprises be able to more easily ease into adoption flash storage solutions, especially because of the fact that a price hit is often involved in moving towards

The Concerto 2200 array is, at least for now, targeted at Virtual Desktop (VDI) and Virtual Server (VSI) infrastructure, and through its NFS ingest capabilities it delivers granular inline deduplication and compression. The addition of a dashboard will allow customers to see data reduction rates so that they can see exactly the effective rate of deduplication on their workload.

With the level of data reduction that it provides, the Concerto 2200 is able to store enough data for 2,500 persistent desktops that are using VDI, with a cost of around $1.81 per GB or $75 per desktop.

With the goal of deduplication and compression being to be delivered without any effect on the workload, Violin claims that its technology will allow for maximum efficiency without any compromise of performance.

With flash becoming more popular, Violin is now in a position to be at the forefront of innovation in the field.