I remember the first time I bought RAM. I got 8 – 1 MB chips of memory for $40 a meg. Ah those were the days. Where’s the Pianer?
Nowadays everything is getting “Farmed” – where the item is not directly attached to a single computer. A Hard drive farm allows scaling the size of your shared folders or whatnot with a few clicks of the mouse. If Microsoft and Intel get the Parallel systems running, then processors will also be Farmed out. So it only goes to say that memory is the next thing to go.
Enter in Violin and the 1010 – an appliance that farms out memory. Using the Violin Intelligent Memory Modules (VIMMs), the DRAM based chips will send out memory to where it’s needed. You can use DRAM, NAND Flash or both, and the machine will support up to 504 GB of RAM.
The system itself is controlled by dual power supply system. The company boasts green standards through claims that a “Fully loaded system supports more than 1GB of DRAM or 10GB of Flash per Watt”. The Appliance will also push 3 million random IOPS at 1,400 MBps.
There is not much on the company itself – Violin started around 2005 in New Jersey. If all claims are true, then this will be a great addition to high end apps running on a network. It will also help with Intel and Microsofts’ Parallel PC efforts. The appliance will not replace a servers’ base RAM, but it could control a Virtual Machines memory requirements.
The companies website: http://www.violin-memory.com/
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I dont see how this can work without a really good memory manager on the client server/workstation. since the dawn of time RAM has been exponetually faster then HD/Network transports. It is my understanding that most RAM can be write/read in the matter of 2-5 clock cycles, on a 800mhz FSB that is 0.25 – 0.625ms. Even on a super fast network you are going to have at least a 5ms lag on your RAM. That is going to make you systems run extremly slow. So the more interesting part of this is the memory manger they must have that flags stagnent RAM and offloads it. And if that is the case, I would rather plug in a 500Gig SATA harddrive and give my machine a half-tera byte ram boost.
In conclusion, I will beleive it when i see it being used.
–dan