Storage news: Violin Sells Flash Array, NetApp Out With New Software, Avere and Amplidata link up

In this week's storage news, Avere and Amplidata are partnering on high-performance scalable storage, NetApp has introduced OnCommandPerformance Manager software products for ONTAP environments, and Violin Memory is helping Echo Health reduce report processing time.

Echo Health buys Violin Memory flash array. Violin Memory (VMEM) announced that Echo Health, provider of healthcare benefit payment consolidation services, has bought is all-flash storage array to enhance its implementation of SQL Server 2008.

Echo’s healthcare payment systems required long overnight batch processing that impacted next-day business operations. Switching to a Violin All Flash Array reduced its nightly report runtimes to about one-third -- from ten to three hours -- improving efficiency to support the firm's projected 40-percent business growth.

"We needed a storage solution that would help us maintain our SLAs and grow our business,” Chad Davis, vice president and chief information officer at Echo Health, said. “With the performance of the Violin All Flash Array, we spend less time on report generation, which allows us to focus on more strategic business initiatives.”

Avere and Amplidata Partner. Avere Systems and object-based software defined storage provider Amplidata announced a partnership to deliver a high-performance storage solution for cloud-enabled data centers. The solution designed for companies in life sciences, oil and gas, media and entertainment, R&D and service provider verticals.

It combines Amplidata’s Amplistor with Avere FlashCloud on FXT Series Edge filers. Using the SPECsfs2008 benchmark, a three-node FXT 3800 cluster achieved 180,229 ops/sec throughput and minimal latency of 0.95ms overall response time (ORT) with an Amplistor system.

The AmpliStor system can be deployed across three geographically dispersed sites.

“We are thrilled to partner with Avere to offer customers a cost effective cloud-scale storage solution that combines high performance file access with massive scalability,” Mike Wall, chairman and CEO of Amplidata, said. “This solution is ideally suited for customers with big data demands who are looking to keep more data online in order to extract value and use it as a competitive advantage.”

NetApp introduces OnCommand Performance Manager.  A new piece of software from NetApp is designed for monitoring and troubleshooting clustered Data ONTAP environments. In addition, the company introduced technology updates to NetApp OnCommand Unified Manager, OnCommand Workflow Automation and OnCommand Insight, providing further storage management, automation and protection for faster IT service delivery.

OnCommand products include Performance Manager for monitoring and troubleshooting with analytics, Workflow Automation 2.2 for defining and scheduling storage processes, Unified Manager 6.1 for an overarching view of the health of storage environments and Insight 7.0 for managing virtualized and cloud environments. "As organizations begin the transition to software-defined service delivery, optimal storage and data management will be critical to their success," Glenn Rhodes, senior director of product marketing at NetApp, said.

"Organizations must have the ability to monitor trends in their data center, understand performance goals and the attainment of those goals and improve control over their storage environment. NetApp’s new OnCommand product offerings directly enable our customers to focus on rich, integrated, automated IT service delivery."