No pun intended but Violin Memory is one of the more flashier companies in the red-hot storage space.

That’s apparent in a few ways. Today the company announced new flash storage arrays for what it calls the “all silicon data center.” That may sound like marketing speak. Well, it is. The company loves to market itself as illustrated with its advertising campaign in airports across the United States.

Bloomberg wrote a piece last week about the ads that feature glowing kryptonite, LSD inspired visions of hypersapce and naked women, more bot than human, bathed in DNA inspired ribbons.

CEO Donald Basile said in the Bloomberg piece the ads are meant to appeal to that generation out there who grew up in a television culture with its own particular vision of the future:

“Our demographic is people in their late 30s to early 50s,” Basile says. “They grew up on Star Trek, Star Wars, and comic books. They respond to three basic things: power, visions of the future, and sex.”

Violin is growing fast. It is planning an IPO. It expects to hire its 400th employee at the beginning of next year. It’s one of a number of startups in the space that are banking on its flash storage capabilities. For Violin that means marketing flash for all aspects of the corporate data center.

Services Angle

Violin represents a new breed of companies that represent a challenge to incumbents such as EMC. But Violin does face its challenges as stated by Wikibon Co-Founder Dave Vellante:

“Violin is essentially traditional storage with a non-traditional twist. It’s like a mini array that can be shared between processors (using PCIe– which is nice). It builds RAID in and is kind of a different animal. So Violin is “Flash as Primary Storage” in the chart above. The problem with Violin is while it brings high speed shared access to storage, it’s very expensive and likely to be subsumed by the all-flash array systems (e.g. SolidFire, Nimbus, etc). SolidFire and Nimbus for example do so much more with regard to efficiency (e.g. snapshots, dedupe, etc) and ultimately (we think) will be much less expensive than Violin.”

Still, Violin has some heavy hitters backing it, including Toshiba and HP and IBM, which has OEM deals with Violin for its technology.

The implications for service providers are apparent. These technologies can separate out the leading providers. Violin and others in this space will need to be considered as more companies look to provide services with technology that is optimized for space, cost and performance.

What that means is the potential for real hypergrowth in the flash market.