Excite Japan Opts for SolidFire

SolidFire, Inc. announced that Excite Japan Co., Ltd, an Internet information services provider, has selected SolidFire for its OpenStack-based next-generation virtual infrastructure.

Over time, Excite plans to gradually migrate all its services to SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage platform. SolidFire’s integration with OpenStack, along with its ability to consolidate multiple workloads and guarantee performance, led Excite Japan to work with SolidFire partner ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) to implement this solution.

Excite Japan provides a variety of internet services including internet portals, blog platforms and smartphone applications – all of which require 24/7 support with zero downtime. Excite selected SolidFire for its OpenStack-based next-generation virtual infrastructure in order to improve reliability and better manage and guarantee performance with SolidFire’s guaranteed QoS.

In business environment, the combination of SolidFire’s all-flash storage infrastructure with OpenStack makes it possible for Excite to reduce overall cycle time from development to release. Previously, it was necessary for the infrastructure division to create distinct release environments, but through its complete integration of SolidFire’s REST-based API with OpenStack, developers are able to create it themselves.

Takashi Fukuda, infrastructure division, Excite Japan, said: “This change has enabled the development team to focus more time and resources on development work and freed up the infrastructure division to focus on system stability and efficiency. As a result, we have been able to accelerate our business.“

Excite Japan selected SolidFire for three key reasons: scalability, high cost-performance ratio and integration with OpenStack.

In Excite’s business, there are frequent changes to the infrastructure environment, making it difficult to forecast future requirements. SolidFire’s ability to scale-out by adding performance and capacity resources as business needs dictate was essential. In addition, SolidFire all-flash storage has delivered a 20X storage performance improvement at a similar cost compared to disk storage and enabled Excite to reduce the overhead for its virtualized platform. Due to SolidFire’s involvement in the OpenStack community and expertise in this area, Excite was confident in working with SolidFire on its first OpenStack deployment.

“As IT leaders prioritize financial and business value as key performance metrics, innovative enterprises in Japan, like Excite, are investing in OpenStack and SolidFire to transform their data centers and power their cloud environments,” said SolidFire’s MD, Asia Pacific and Japan, Kris Day. “SolidFire is the only block storage built from the ground-up for the most demanding OpenStack environments, delivering guaranteed performance, high availability and unsurpassed scale for Excite’s cloud infrastructure.“

The presence of SolidFire’s Active Support capabilities in the Japanese market was also a factor in Excite’s decision. ITOCHU Techno-Solutions has OpenStack experience evaluating and deploying a variety of OpenStack solutions.

Fukuda added: “ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation and SolidFire are very proactive and well-versed in OpenStack, giving us the confidence that they can support our business in Japan.“

“CTC’s expertise in building large-scale private clouds that leverage virtualization and orchestration technologies, like OpenStack, played a key role in deploying SolidFire’s proven, trusted storage platform to meet Excite Japan’s demanding infrastructure requirements,” said Hirotoshi Ueno, cloud solution planning department, CTC. “We will continue to provide local technical, commercial and operational support as Excite expands its SolidFire storage system to meet business demands and deliver more value to its customers.“