Violin Memory, Inc. today announced a technology alliance with AMD (NYSE: AMD) that will combine memory appliances and the HyperTransport(TM) technology high-speed interconnect in order to meet the demands of ever-increasing dataset size and application performance. The combined technology offering will cost-effectively extend server memory to Terabytes with significant reductions in power consumption, while increasing system reliability and availability.


The Violin 1010 connects to a server and provides almost 10 times the capacity of memory per rack and per Watt. A single rack of Violin 1010 can support 10 TByte of DRAM at less than 1W per GByte! The 90% power savings per GByte is important for the green data center.

The Violin 1010 is based on Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology. VXM solves the key problems of scalable memory, including power efficiency and reliability. VXM also has in-built support for other memory types, including NAND Flash.

The applications that benefit are those that process large datasets such as image, video, web content or scientific data. Today, systems are built with performance-limiting disk arrays or power-inefficient clustered servers. The Violin 1010 provides a third alternative; place the dataset in very fast and dense Memory Appliances.

The Violin 1010 and the associated Violin Intelligent Memory Modules (VIMMs) are now available. A 120 GByte DRAM Starter Kit is available for less than $50K.