Violin Memory, Inc., a global pioneer of award-winning all flash storage platform solutions for primary storage and active workloads, today announced availability of a Block Storage (Cinder) driver supporting the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 (Liberty release).

The driver supports the OpenStack Liberty release and integrates with Violin's Concerto OS 7 operating system, which is designed to deliver expanded flash storage performance, tightly integrated data services and management simplicity for customers deploying OpenStack cloud services on Violin's industry leading Flash Storage Platform (FSP). When combined with the new FSP 7650 and FSP 7450, which offer an industry leading combination of consistent low-latency, affordability, density, scalability, and performance, service providers and enterprise customers can easily deploy private and hybrid cloud solutions.

The Violin Cinder driver also builds upon the advanced data protection features of the Flash Storage Platform with the addition of support for two new features: Consistency Groups and LUN Encryption.

Consistency Groups can provide better data protection through snapshots and data backups, as well as remote replication. Through this feature, Red Hat OpenStack users can now take snapshots of multiple volumes within a Consistency Group, at a single point in time, to ensure data consistency on the FSP.

On the FSP, software based LUN encryption can be enabled or disabled on a per LUN basis across all of the different types of LUNs, including thick, thin, and deduplication LUNs. Since the encryption is software based, key management can be done off of the array, which can offer a higher degree of security than hardware based encryption.

OpenStack is a leading platform on which to build private and public cloud computing environments that support Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Cinder is the infrastructure service for managing block-based storage in the OpenStack framework. Violin's Cinder Driver for Concerto OS 7 integrates directly with OpenStack-based private and public clouds via its sophisticated REST API, delivering a highly agile platform that supports developer operations, with support for all required OpenStack Liberty Cinder APIs. The driver comes with every Flash Storage Platform at no additional cost and is fully documented to simplify deployment, installation, configuration, and troubleshooting.

"By supporting Red Hat OpenStack, enterprise customers can confidently leverage Violin's industry leading all flash arrays in private cloud environments," said Sudhir Prasad, Senior Director, Product Management. "When taking advantage of the industry leading combination of high performance and ultra-low latency of the FSP, customers can seamlessly deploy private cloud solutions while maintaining the SLAs their businesses demand."