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back to article Violin Memory flashes $50m wad from SAP

Flash array start-up Violin Memory has gained business software powerhouse SAP as an investor. SAP Ventures and Highland Capital have joined existing investors Toshiba, Juniper Networks and others in injecting $50 million in a D-round of funding, bringing total funding to $150 million since it was founded in 2005. CEO Don …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow...

    Every picture I see of this guy, he gets fatter and fatter.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wow...

      I would be more worried if it was the opposite way.

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  2. Gordon 10

    Wtf?

    The principle of Hadoop is that it runs on low cost commodity hardware.

    Putting a custom flash array in the mix kinda defeats the point.

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    1. jcrb
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      Mushroom

      Re: Wtf?

      The "principle" of Hadoop is NOT that it runs on low cost commodity hardware, your statement is a classic example of ex post facto justification.

      The "principle" of Hadoop is split up a problem too big for one machine to handle into a problem multiple machines can handle. The number and type of machines is supposed to be chosen to most cost effectively sole the problem.

      The servers you would build a Hadoop cluster with today would not be the same servers you would have build it from 4 years ago. Why? Because technology changes.

      So yes, it used to be that a wall of cheap servers with local disks was the best way to do that, but technology changes and it isn't the best way any more.

      You can accept at this is true, or at least be willing to accept that it might be true and go have a look, or you can put your foot down and stand on "principle", its your choice.

      I'm going to guess you will stand on "principle", that's the usual Luddite reaction to this sort of thing.

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      1. Gordon 10
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        Happy

        Re: Wtf?

        Happy to reconsider my principles there are no sacred cows or Elephants.

        However when I google for Flash-Hadoop use cases nothing but sales blurb pops up.

        Give me a link to prove me wrong.

        15 years of industry experience tells me that you rarely get burnt by being suspicious of the upsell which is exactly what's happening in the big data space right now.

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      2. Tony Rogerson
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        Re: Wtf?

        You are partly right; but in terms of infrastrucure the principle is that the servers in the cluster are fully redundant, so shared nothing, hence dasd. Connecting the machines in the cluster to a SAN which is basically what this article is saying goes completely against scale out.

        Commodity storage in the cluster nodes can be achieved with commodity SSD, SATA or PCIe based to get the local IOps and still be cost effectively disposable.

        There is definitely an upsell into this space but I'd expect that because lets face we have a lot of folk with vestied interests in keeping SAN technology.

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