Virtual Storage and Memory Appliance Combo the Latest Approach to Low Latency

For those on board the advancing trend on Wall Street to virtualize data centers and computing in general, the announcement from Violin and FalconStor this week, that they are offering a virtual storage server bundled with a fast memory appliance, should be interesting. The companies say that for $300 per gigabtye, their storage servers and memory units can stream data at speeds of two gigabytes per second and beyond, accelerating applications 10 to 50 times, while providing the benefits of virtualized storage.The Violin memory appliance, the company says, handles I/Os per second at a rate that is 1,000 times faster than hard disk and 50 times faster than Flash solid state drives, streaming three gigabytes per second and potentially accelerating applications ten to 100 times. FalconStor's NSS storage server manages up to 60 terabytes per rack of storage. Combining the Violin cache with the storage could potentially help minimize data center space issues while accommodating the high speeds demanded of algorithmic trading and complex event processing.