SolidFire: Agile Infrastructure Built With All-Flash Storage System

SolidFire, Inc., in all-flash storage systems, introduced the latest addition to its Agile Infrastructure (AI) family of converged infrastructure offerings.

Built with SolidFire’s all-flash storage system at the foundation, AI incorporates technology from VMware and Cisco into a pre-validated reference design. The combined solution enables accelerated deployment of a dynamic IT infrastructure that allows for consolidation of mixed application workloads onto a single platform.

With AI for Virtual Infrastructure, SolidFire has demonstrated the ability for enterprises to efficiently accommodate the demands of mixed workloads from a single storage platform. Leveraging SolidFire’s QoS capabilities, storage policies can be provisioned and enforced to isolate each workload while running simultaneously within a shared infrastructure.

Demonstrating the mixed workload capabilities of architecture
through the validation process,
concurrent operations run on the AI design included:

• Boot storm of 200 VMware Horizon View desktops
• Two hosted Oracle OLTP database workloads running approximately 230,000 TPM
• MongoDB job running 70 concurrent threads
• Inline data reduction, including deduplication, compression and thin provisioning, driving 13.5x efficiency rates across all three workloads

“In the past, flash arrays have been most commonly deployed in single application deployment models. To move beyond this phase, flash systems must prove their ability to reliably handle mixed data center workload configurations while still ensuring that every application gets the performance it needs,” said Eric Burgener, flash storage research director, IDC. “Solutions like SolidFire’s AI that incorporate performance, scalability, enterprise data services and granular QoS controls are best suited for the mixed workload consolidation that allows customers to fully benefit from the secondary economic benefits of flash, which include far fewer devices, reduced energy and floor space requirements, fewer servers to drive storage performance, and lower software license costs (due to needing fewer servers).”

“Enterprise IT departments are under considerable pressure to deliver IT services with greater speed, agility and efficiency than ever before,” said SolidFire’s founder and CEO Dave Wright. “AI for Virtual Infrastructure provides enterprises with a proven roadmap for deployment that takes advantage of the scalability, automation and guaranteed performance control native to SolidFire’s all-flash array. With AI, customers confidently consolidate mixed workloads onto a single platform in less time, with less space and for less money than alternative converged infrastructure offerings.”

The second in a series of AI designs, AI for Virtual Infrastructure joins SolidFire’s existing AI for OpenStack offering. With SolidFire AI, IT departments can design and deploy a dynamic IT infrastructure to help them achieve greater infrastructure agility, automation, predictability and scale.

SolidFire was demonstrating AI for Virtual Infrastructure through August 27, 2014 at VMworld in San Francisco, CA.