SolidFire Delivers All-SSD System for Cloud Providers

SolidFire, Inc. announced the availability of its high-performance, all-SSD storage systems as new customers ViaWest, Inc., Databarracks Ltd., Calligo Limited and CloudSigma AG roll out services with guaranteed performance SLAs.

SolidFire’s SF3010 and SF6010 storage nodes set the bar for high-performance cloud storage. These systems allow cloud providers to deliver performance guarantees that bring business critical and performance sensitive applications like Oracle, SAP, and NoSQL variants (eg. MongoDB, Cassandra) into the cloud.

SolidFire is an SSD storage system designed for cloud service providers. By combining scale-out architecture with patent-pending QoS controls, cloud service providers can now set and maintain performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. With this launch, providers are now equipped with a high-performance storage environment to run all of their customers’ tier-one applications.

Business Opportunities For Cloud Service Providers
Hosting business-critical and performance-sensitive applications represents an opportunity for cloud providers. With SolidFire, they can deliver guaranteed performance services below the cost of traditional high-performance disks, and are able to back those service with firm performance SLAs. Currently, more than 20 additional cloud service providers worldwide are evaluating SolidFire to expand and support their cloud offerings.

"The ability to host a broader range of a customer’s compute workload is at the heart of cloud provider differentiation, profitability, and long term success," said Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire.

"As one of the largest privately held data center providers in the U.S. with customers like Red Robin, Patron Tequila, University of Texas at Dallas, eCollege, Guitar Center, Symantec and Frontier Airlines, our continued success rests on our ability to innovate and serve the evolving needs of our most discerning enterprise customers," said Jason Carolan, CTO of ViaWest. "By adding the SolidFire storage system, we will provide a whole new set of IT services predicated on performance guarantees and industry-leading SLAs."

"SolidFire has the potential to fundamentally change the way customers leverage the cloud," said Databarracks technical director Oliver Mather. "Today we support the backup of over 10PB of data for thousands of customers in the U.K. and globally. Yet the cloud is evolving far beyond backup, and with SolidFire we can now extend services to our customers and support their most sensitive and business-critical applications. We are evolving our infrastructure and services in line with our customers’ demands of the cloud. In most cases, with SolidFire we are able to provide better performance at a lower cost than customers can get with their on-premise infrastructure."

"Rather than just throwing SSDs in an array, which anyone could do, the SolidFire technology allows us to bring down the price of SSD to compete with mainstream HDD," said CloudSigma CTO, Robert Jenkins. "We are saying goodbye to magnetic storage all together, and with SolidFire we have dramatically improved the performance of our entire cloud. CloudSigma customers will now be able to get much higher virtual machine performance at the same price as befOR It is like putting a more powerful engine in your car and not having to pay for it. SolidFire is our default storage medium and we expect this to have significant impact on our growth rate and existing customer base going forward."

SolidFire Nurtures Cloud Service Provider Channel
For providers, predictable and cost-effective technology is only half of delivering a cloud. Developing the right go-to-market strategy, programs, and SLAs are essential to conveying these new services to enterprise customers. With technology and dedicated go-to-market support, SolidFire is helping cloud providers develop, position and deploy services.

"SolidFire is ushering in a new era in cloud computing with the general availability release of the SF3010 and SF6010," continued Wright. "Cloud providers world-wide are now able to deploy a scalable storage system that delivers guaranteed performance below the cost of disk, and confidently host their customers’ high-performance applications."

Pricing and Performance
The SolidFire storage systems are built through the combination of up to one hundred SF3010 or SF6010 nodes over a 10GbE network, making the system capable of delivering over 2PB of capacity and 5 million IOPS. Both products run SolidFire’s Element OS 4.0, and are capable of delivering storage capacity below $4/GB and a price-performance ratio below $1/IOP.