SolidFire With New Element X Program

SolidFire, Inc. is broadening the reach of its scale-out storage platform by qualifying its Element OS on select industry-standard hardware platforms.

Complementing its existing appliance-based offering, the Element X program announced is designed to more closely align with growing demand from the largest-scale enterprise and service provider customers to integrate SolidFire’s software into their pre-existing hardware supply chains.

“From day one, the value in the SolidFire technology has been 100% in the software,” said Dave Wright, founder and CEO. “Our go-to-market motion is built arounddelivering this software through the form factors, programs and channels that our customers are demanding in different segments of the market. The Element X Program, which allows our hyper-scale customers to consume this software in precise alignment with their evolving hardware supply chain needs, is a natural evolution of this model.“

Through the Element X Program, qualified hyper-scale customers can license Element OS to run on hardware either chosen from SolidFire’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), or partner with the company to jointly validate new hardware platforms to ensure they adhere to the necessary design, quality and performance standards SolidFire is known for. The program launches with two qualified platforms on Element X HCL: the Dell PowerEdge Platform and Cisco’s UCS C-Series rack-mount server.

“Hyper-Scale customers are unique,” continued Wright, “The scale at which they operate enables them to establish volume-purchasing agreements that dramatically reduce their hardware costs, and they often leverage a single hardware platform for a variety of purposes within their datacenter. These companies have extensive data center footprints, treat IT as a profit center and are increasingly establishing their own hardware supply chains, integration, inventory management and sparing requirements.“

With the announcement of Element X, the company feature set can be delivered through the four models for Infrastructure Consumption: As a service through fueled by company’s partners, as Converged Infrastructure (SolidFire AI) or a turnkey appliance (SF-series) through Cloud Builder channel partners, and as software for industry standard hardware platforms.

SolidFire offers a single storage platform through four different consumption models, satisfying the needs of the smallest start-ups to the largest enterprises and even hyper-scale customers. To help customers determine which consumption model is best for their needs, it has created a tool called the Infrastructure Consumption Continuum, which can be downloaded for free (registration needed.)