Violin has reintroduced what appears to be the GridIron OneAppliance TurboCharger Storage Appliance, renamed the “Maestro Memory Appliance”, developed originally by GridIron, which Violin purchased in January, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer. However, Violin’s description is so fragmentary, possibly because the company is distracted by an impending IPO, from which it hopes to raise $144M-$188M, and Floyer advises storage executives to go to the still extant GridIron site for an adequate description.

Violin is making a transition from an OEM sales model to direct sales to users, writes FLoyer, which probably explains the lack of attention to providing complete information on Maestro. In fiscal 2012, according to reports, HP accounted for 64% of Violin’s revenue. In 2013 so far HP has only provided 10% of its revenue, while sales and marketing costs rose to $61 million on total sales of $70 million. Net losses grew to $109 million.

In any case, Floyer’s description of the appliance makes it sound less than exciting. While other companies are fielding flash storage appliances and in-server flash that provides read/write capabilities at microsecond speeds, the GridIron storage appliance is a read-only cache that must be populated from a, presumably disk-based, storage array. “Violin has actively promoted flash-only arrays as a replacement for spinning rust,” Floyer writes. “They extol the virtues of low latency and eliminating IO outliers from disk. It is interesting to see Violin pivot to marketing flash as extending the life of disk.”

The appliance connects to the SAN switched infrastructure, and, says the Violin site, provides storage caching, although it provides no detailed information on this service. Violin says it is “powered by hardware-accelerated Bayesian profiling algorithms” that, it says, are faster than EMC FAST. However, again it provides no details.

Violin also says it comes with storage tiering services that can move data from existing storage arrays to the appliance. Floyer writes that this sounds like basic data caching.

Possibly the most interesting thing about the appliance, besides what Floyer describes as “the best graphic art”, is its potential as a data backup and disaster recovery device. The Violin site says, “Worried that your business-critical data is prone to disruption in the event of a disaster? Maestro comes to your rescue with comprehensive data protection through memory speed mirroring between data centers.” Floyer wonders if this is a competitor for IBM’s SVC. Of course given that the data would have to travel to the remote site presumably via the Internet (or possibly on tape delivered by truck) and then be loaded into Maestro from a storage array, it is hard to understand how the mirroring will work at “memory speed”.

The TurboCharger appliance “is an interesting product and worthy of investigation by storage executives,” Floyer concludes. However, presuming that this is the GridIron appliance, those executives are best advised to see relevant information on the GridIron site rather than Violin’s.