Violin Memory's IPO fell on its first day, and the company spent its short public life trying to recover. The Santa Clara company built storage arrays made entirely of flash memory chips, at a time when most corporate data still sat on spinning hard drives. Flash cost more but answered requests far faster, which mattered for big databases. In September 2013, all-flash storage was the hot new corner of the data center, and Violin was one of the first to sell it.

Chips Instead of Disks

Violin was incorporated in March 2005 and recapitalized in 2009, when Donald Basile arrived as CEO. It shipped its Flash Memory Arrays in May 2010 and added PCIe flash cards in March 2013. The pitch was raw speed. A bank or retailer could swap racks of hard drives for a few Violin boxes and run its databases in a fraction of the time. The risk was that much bigger storage vendors would build or buy their own flash products.

Nine Dollars, Then Court

Violin priced at $9 a share in late September 2013 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as VMEM. The stock dropped on day one, and within weeks the board replaced Basile as CEO. Rivals such as Pure Storage, EMC and NetApp crowded the flash market. Violin never turned a profit. Its shares were delisted in November 2016, and it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2016.

Cover: The Old Violin, William Michael Harnett. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an old violin hung on a door.