New Customers for NetApp SolidFire All-Flash Arrays

One year ago, NetApp, Inc. closed its acquisition of SolidFire, fueling the advance of the next-generation data center that is transforming IT for enterprises and services providers.

SolidFire solutions deliver data center infrastructure that operates with the flexibility and speed of the cloud. Customers can reduce cost and complexity by safely consolidating mission-critical applications onto a single storage system. Innovations in software enable scalability with no disruptions and provide guaranteed performance to every application.

Customers also benefit from NetApp SolidFire innovation in licensing models. The FlashForward Capacity Licensing model is flexible, perpetual and predictable. Customers can buy hardware and software separately so they get what they need, when they need it. Perpetual and transferable licenses decouple software from hardware upgrades, repurposing or consolidation. Licenses are transferrable and not locked to particular hardware, enabling users to upgrade or replace hardware at any time. Built-in, usage-based discounts ensure software and support costs decline as provisioned capacity increases.

“With much of the hard integration work behind us, the NetApp SolidFire team is now fully focused on delivering the next generation of transformative data management solutions across the entire spectrum of infrastructure consumption,” said NetApp SolidFire VP and GM Dave Wright. “With the full resources of NetApp behind us, you’ll want to keep an eye on NetApp SolidFire this year as we deliver new solutions that enable our customers to transform their data center operations, deliver IT services efficiently and economically, and capitalize on new market opportunities.”

Over the past year, the SolidFire business has contributed to NetApp being named a leader in the Gartner Solid State Array Magic Quadrant. The company is also the fastest growing all-flash provider, expanding twice as fast, year over year, as the overall all-flash market (1).

Customers Transform Operations Quickly and Efficiently with SolidFire
With SolidFire all-flash arrays, customers can adapt, move, scale and transform their operations much more quickly and efficiently, thanks to its ‘shared nothing’ architecture. This approach eliminates the need to create siloes of infrastructure for each workload. Individual nodes within the distributed storage network manage the data, redundancy and recovery in a self-healing manner. Organizations can automate storage infrastructure to keep operational costs low, providing an environment for OpenStack, VMware, VDI, database, DevOps and service provider deployments.
 
Customers driving data center transformation with SolidFire solutions include:
    •    Carrenza, a cloud service company based in London, UK, needed a new approach to meet rapidly evolving customer application and infrastructure demands. The company chose SolidFire to increase infrastructure agility and responsiveness, while reducing storage maintenance time and administration effort. Its customers can now scale storage resources without up-front capital expenses.
    •    FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation), in intelligent analytics and software tools that improve business decision making, relies on SolidFire’s integration with OpenStack and VMware and on its guarantee of exact levels of performance and capacity to meet service-level agreements for its FICO Analytic Cloud clients. The FICO Analytic Cloud gives businesses the ability to create and deploy data analytics applications up to 70% faster.
    •    Internet Solutions (IS), a converged communications service provider, operates in 14 countries across Africa, with international offices worldwide. With SolidFire, IS became the first service provider to offer performance-based tiering services in Africa, a major differentiator for the company, enabling it to meet increasingly complex customer demands.
    •    Premier Eye Care, a healthcare provider based in Tampa, FL, manages routine vision care, medical and surgical eye care services, and administrative services for its partner health plans. It implemented a SolidFire for its SQL database workloads to solve major challenges with backup and recovery, latency, and reporting. In doing so, Premier Eye Care reduced its backup and recovery time from up to 9 hours to 7 minutes.

(1) Source: IDC, Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker – 2016Q3, December 1, 2016