Violin Memory Accelerates Financial Applications by 300 Percent

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Apr 17, 2012) - Violin Memory, Inc., provider of one of the world's fastest and most scalable flash Memory Arrays, helped North Island Credit Union accelerate data processing by three times, providing faster and more efficient banking services to its members.

Business Critical Challenge
North Island Credit Union, based in San Diego, California, understood its storage regime was antiquated and adversely affecting daily IT operations. As the credit union grew, so did nightly and month-end batch processing times, eventually spilling over into the next business day transactions, hindering the company from improving member services and preventing the IT department from meeting service level agreements. Solid state storage solutions, on the other hand, are made to solve the performance-critical data processing issues often encountered in the banking and financial services industries.

Flash Memory System Solution
To address its challenge, North Island turned to Violin Memory's 3200 flash Memory Arrays. "The proof-of-concept results were stunning," said Michael Glogowski, assistant vice president of core network systems of North Island Credit Union. "The times were unbelievable. Batch reports that took five hours now ran in 90 minutes. Upload jobs that used to run in 90 minutes now took 15 minutes."

North Island quickly moved forward with deploying Violin's 3200 Memory Arrays. The Violin 3200 series is a redundant, modular 3U Flash memory array that scales to 20TB of Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash and provides the industry's best price/performance attributes. It is the first in the Violin 3000 series of Memory Arrays that scales to more than 240TB in a rack with performance topping two million IOPS. The enterprise-grade Violin 3200 includes hardware-based Flash RAID across hot-swappable memory modules to provide robust data protection and spike free latency of less than 100 microseconds.

Rapid Processing Results
Before deployment of the Violin 3200 Memory Arrays, the North Island Credit Union IT department was unable to accommodate requests from business departments to reschedule night batch processing. Now, nightly batch jobs that previously ran from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. now run from 6:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Month-end batch processing that ran from 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. now jets from 7:00 p.m. until midnight. The tremendous performance increase allows North Island to reallocate third shift operations and go lights out.

North Island currently runs its core banking application on Violin's flash Memory Arrays, but the IT department plans to migrate the credit union's document management system to Violin Memory as well. According to Glogowski, "The ROI payback is in six months!"

Violin's flash Memory Arrays are changing the data center for companies like AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Juniper and HP through its patent-pending flash vRAID technology. Violin recently won AlwaysOn 2011 Company of the Year, SearchDataCenter Product of the Year, Gartner "Cool Vendor" for storage, and was named a Top Startup to Watch by SearchStorage.com.

RELATED LINKS AND CONVERSATIONS

• Follow us on our blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• View our Flash Forward™ videos Part I and Part II and Technology Video Series.
• Learn why the Violin Memory architecture is unique.

About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin Memory is pioneering the future of Flash memory in the enterprise data center with Memory Arrays that accelerate business critical applications and enable enterprises to virtualize and optimize their IT infrastructures. Specifically designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin's Memory Arrays scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IOPS with low, spike-free latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Violin Memory products, visit www.vmem.com.

About North Island Credit Union
North Island Credit Union, chartered in 1940 to serve the military and civil service at Naval Air Station (NAS) North Island, now serves members in San Diego, Riverside, and Orange Counties in California. The $1.1 billion credit union has ten branches, 83,000 members, and 290 employees. 2010-2011 allowed the credit union to fully celebrate its military heritage with its own 70th Anniversary as well as joining in support of the 100th anniversary of Naval Aviation, with NAS North Island recognized as the birthplace of naval aviation in 1911.