SolidFire Launches Benchmark

SolidFire, Inc., a company focused on all-SSD storage systems designed for the cloud, has released the first definitive requirements for cloud service providers to deliver guaranteed QoS within a multi-tenant primary storage platform.

In a release, the company noted that even as enterprise adoption of cloud matures, performance variability remains one of the largest barriers to deploying business-critical applications from a cloud infrastructure. While most cloud providers can only offer best effort performance, only the SolidFire QoS benchmark ensures guaranteed application performance regardless of system condition or application activity.

"Service providers are consistently telling us that they need to be able to guarantee QoS in order to host mission critical applications in the cloud. The reality is that this is much easier said than done. QoS functionality has largely been bolted on as an afterthought in legacy storage products, resulting in performance that can still be unpredictable," said Simon Robinson, storage research VP at the 451 Group. "By incorporating QoS functionality into the fundamental design of its storage platform, SolidFire is offering service providers an alternative to sub-optimal workarounds such as rate limiting, ring-fencing and prioritization schemes."

The company said the ability to guarantee performance in all situations- including failure scenarios, system overload, variable workloads, and elastic demand – requires an architecture specifically designed to support QoS.

SolidFire’s all- SSD storage solution is an architecture which fulfilled all six requirements of the definitive QoS benchmark, allowing cloud service providers to guarantee storage performance for every application:

1. All-SSD Architecture: Enables the delivery of consistent latency for every IO
2. True Scale-out Architecture: Allows for linear, predictable performance gains as systems scale
3. RAID-less Data Protection: Ensures predictable performance in any failure condition
4. Balanced Load Distribution: Eliminates hot spots that create unpredictable IO latency
5. Fine Grain QoS Control: Completely eliminate noisy neighbors, and guarantee volume performance
6. Performance Virtualization: Control performance independent of capacity and on demand

"Cloud service providers should be looking at QoS with the long term goal of writing firm SLAs against storage performance," said Dave Wright, SolidFire founder and CEO. "SolidFire’s QoS Benchmark educates providers with a clear methodology for understanding the conditions that are necessary to deliver Guaranteed QoS. Without it, cloud providers will remain unable to efficiently meet the rising performance requirements of their enterprise customers."