MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 15, 2013) - Violin Memory, Inc., provider of memory-based storage systems, has been selected by Pella Corporation, a leader in creating high-quality windows and doors for homes and businesses, to accelerate enterprise resource planning (ERP), online quote management, payroll, and other business-critical applications by up to five times. The Violin purpose-built Flash Memory Arrays provide Pella with the strategic, long-term advantage needed to stay ahead of the competition by sustaining continual process improvement, increasing productivity, decreasing operational expenses by $150,000 annually, and delivering a better user experience.

Improving Business Agility, Strengthening Technology Leadership
To maintain its 85-year history of innovation, Pella is committed to incorporating new technologies, increasing productivity, and practicing environmental stewardship. When it comes to storage, Pella's existing high-end, disk-based environment provided adequate performance, but the IT Department needed to look at new and alternative technologies to support the company's growing IOPs. Pella's existing SAN could not support its growth strategy, and the IT team wanted a solution that that would grow linearly but transparently, without increasing the cost of management.

"The Violin technology really caught our attention when we realized we could use it to do more for a lower price, while potentially taking I/O bottlenecks out of our future roadmap," said Jim Thomas, director of IT operations at Pella.

Accelerated Results and Cost Savings
With the confidence to bypass a proof of concept, Pella implemented four Violin 6000 Flash Memory Arrays as its primary storage solution for several business-critical systems. The memory-based storage systems are used to run Pella's Oracle ERP instance, Oracle data warehousing, online quote management and PeopleSoft to process weekly payroll for several thousand employees.

The benefits of deploying Violin Memory Arrays as Tier-1 storage were immediate. Pella streamlined its nightly mass data load by cutting completion time in half and tripling batch throughput; cutting MRP job runs by 38 percent and end assemblies by 57 percent. The Violin solution has also produced instant results for Pella's payroll system, reducing a 3-hour process down to less than 30 minutes. Beyond Pella's business critical application storage needs, Thomas plans to leverage the Violin arrays as he expands the company's virtual desktop (VDI) environment to cover 25 percent of the corporation's workforce.

Thomas expects the Violin solution will save Pella $150,000 annually in depreciation costs compared to the SAN the company used previously. "Add on to that; space savings in the datacenter, reduced power consumption, and increased capabilities that we're going to be able to deliver by having much, much more IO than we've historically had, it's one more step forward in helping drive our costs down while delivering a better user experience," he explained.

Making Storage a Strategic Asset
Pella views the Violin solution as a strategic, long-term asset that will help the company maintain its technology and industry leadership. According to Thomas, "Picking Violin was about looking to the future and choosing the best possible technology to help us continue to stay one step ahead with our IT infrastructure."

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About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin Memory is pioneering a new class of high-performance flash-based storage systems that are designed to bring storage performance in-line with high-speed applications, servers and networks. Violin Flash Memory Arrays are specifically designed at each level of the system architecture starting with memory and optimized through the array to leverage the inherent capabilities of flash memory and meet the sustained high-performance requirements of business critical applications, virtualized environments and Big Data solutions in enterprise data centers. Specifically designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin's Flash Memory Arrays can scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IOPS with low, predictable latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Violin Memory products, visit www.vmem.com.