Flash Provider Violin Launches “Disk is Dead” Promo to Up Data Center Presence

Flash memory vendor Violin (VMEM) kicked off a new promotion aimed at IT professionals and channel partners to declare flash storage’s time has arrived for data center installations.

“Disk drives served the IT community well,” said Amy Love, Violin chief marketing officer. “But IT requirements have changed, disk drives can’t keep up, and flash storage technology simply provides a superior solution,” she said.

The campaign, called “Disk is Dead,” asks visitors to the vendor’s website to download a whitepaper entitled, “The Economic Impact and Value of Violin’s Flash Storage Platform,” to enter a contest to win a trip to see the “Fare Thee Well” Grateful Dead concert in Santa Clara, CA on June 27, 2015.

There are separate contests for Violin channel partners and IT sales professionals with information on how each can enter the giveaways located on the Violin Partner Portal.

Love said the point of the promotion was to up the dialogue on flash storage’s readiness for the data center.

“We’ve launched our ‘Disk is Dead’ campaign to underscore this point, and to also begin a dialogue among data center professionals that not only is there a better storage medium, but that there are also better architectural approaches to 24×7 data center-scale storage, than simply swapping one type of drive for another,” she said.

“The idea to leverage the Grateful Dead ‘Fare Thee Well’ concert resonates strongly with this audience,” Love said.

With the campaign, visitors to Violin’s contest website receive one entry for each downloaded thought leadership resource. New resources can be added weekly to earn additional entries.

On Violin’s recent fiscal 2015 earnings call, president and chief executive Kevin DeNuccio set the stage for the campaign and outlined the vendor’s strategy by terming flash technology “one of the most disruptive shifts in IT today, the enterprise migration from disk to flash for data storage.”

Violin’s sales for FQ4 2015 fell 6 percent sequentially to $20.5 million, well below the company’s earlier guidance of $23 million to $25 million for the period. The company lost $46.8 million or $0.50 per share on a GAAP basis, sequentially deepening its net loss from the prior period of $23.5 million or $0.25 per share last quarter but less than the $56.5 million or $0.69 a share the company dropped at the same time last year.

In February, Violin debuted its Flash Storage Platform, including the new 7300 and 7700 all flash arrays, Concerto OS 7, and Symphony 3 management control.

After a run up, Violin’s stock has slipped 18 percent in the last month to hover near its 52-week low.