Financial Services IT Provider Richard Fleischman & Associates Selecting SolidFire

SolidFire, Inc announced that RFA (Richard Fleischman & Associates), trusted technology partner to investment management clients for more than two decades, has deployed SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage platform to guarantee performance for its private-cloud services and on-demand hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Solution (IaaS) for firms that require agility, security and reliability.

Recently named Best IT Consultancy Service at the 2015 HFM Technology Awards, RFA has served the IT needs of some of the world’s most demanding financial services customers for more than 20 years. RFA delivers transaction-processing applications on its own VMware-based private cloud platform, which enables customers to move all their applications and data from on-site servers to a hosted model – allowing predictable costs and reducing capital expenditure related to on-site network hardware. To ensure scalable performance for customers, and to deliver differentiating capabilities unshackling its own business potential, RFA turned to all-flash storage.

RFA uses SolidFire for its highest-load applications, as a storage tier handling large and sensitive databases. Performance-related issues have decreased by 100% with SolidFire, leading to customer satisfaction. This is possible because QoS within RFA’s multi-tenant infrastructure is built into the SolidFire architecture to eliminate noisy neighbor issues. Furthermore, the solution’s high density reduces rack and power consumption and raises RFA’s overall storage ROI.

Starting with a SolidFire SF3010 cluster, RFA can scale out linearly one node at a time to as many as 100 nodes, enabling growth as business needs evolve.

RFA’s IaaS platform is powered by VMware hypervisor for its maturity, performance, stability and rich ecosystem. SolidFire’s storage system is deeply integrated into this environment via SolidFire’s REST-based API. By integrating SolidFire into its VMware platform, RFA was able to realize cost-savings and improve service levels due to automated provisioning and end-to-end monitoring.

“Our customers run heavy analytics applications that need to return results in milliseconds. While scalability of our platform was one of our biggest concerns, we also needed a storage solution that could deliver high IOPS and provide guaranteed QoS,” said Grigoriy Milis, CTO, RFA. “SolidFire sets us free, because it unlocks the scalability of our platforms. We can guarantee performance to our clients while expanding our market-leading private-cloud services. The solution is not only stable, but it also substantially reduces our core consumption. On the business side, it opens revenue-generating services we otherwise would not be able to provide.“

“As the first company in its business niche to deploy SolidFire in a private-cloud platform, RFA is leveraging SolidFire storage as a competitive differentiator that accelerates its business,” said SolidFire’s global service provider programs manager Stuart Oliver. “Fueled by SolidFire, RFA can strengthen its position as a market leader, grow its business to accommodate new customers and monetize the possibility of innovative storage-as-a-service offerings.“

“With space and power at a premium, more and more of the financial industry’s 4,000 hedge funds don’t want to own or maintain their own resources. However, these companies can only trust private cloud when it’s architected correctly to eliminate any performance issues and that’s exactly what SolidFire enabled us to achieve,” said Gair Betts, RFA director of sales. “With SolidFire all-flash storage at the core of our private cloud platform, we are here for our customers with a full range of cloud, advisory and support services. We are seizing the advantages we gain from SolidFire to drive high performance, innovation, and growth.“