SolidFire And The Rise Of Flash Among Cloud Providers

The adoption of Solid State Drives (SSDs) amongst cloud providers continues to be a major trend. Cloud providers are looking to differentiate from cut-and-dry public clouds, and flash storage allows them to offer better performance. SolidFire, a provider of all-flash storage systems designed for large scale cloud infrastructure, continues to capitalize on this trend, showing great momentum among cloud service providers (CSPs). The company recently announced both Datapipe and Internap as customers, and is adding nine more customers today.

SolidFire’s solution allows volume-level Quality of Service (QoS) controls, letting service providers  guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. This functionality is coupled  with in-line data reduction techniques and system-wide automation, resulting in substantial capital and operating cost savings relative to traditional storage systems, according to the company.

The nine new customers are sizeable players that have launched services atop of SolidFire:

• Clearview International (Dallas, TX): a managed hosting provider with a heavy focus on delivering managed solutions customized to enterprise customers.
• Codero (Austin, TX): focuses heavily on deep integration and automation to deliver an exceptionally predictable, On-Demand, Enterprise Class hosting experience to its customers.
• OnRamp (Austin, TX): OnRamp has been quickly expanding. The company offers colocation, cloud computing, high security hosting and disaster recovery services.
• DRFortress (Honolulu, HI): the largest carrier-neutral colocation and cloud services provider operating in Hawaii chose SolidFire as the block storage to fuel its cloud and managed hosting business.
• GetCloudServices (Fort Pierce, FL): The hosted IaaS provider touted a go-to-market and positioning exercise it did with SolidFire, which helped it better develop and position its block storage service offering.
• QuoVadis (Hamilton, BM): one of the earliest IaaS providers in Bermuda.
• ServInt (Reston, VA): a pioneer in VPS cloud hosting,  it has long offered managed and self-service cloud solutions to its customers.
• Webhuset (Bergen, Norway): The Norway hoster said it wanted to be able to run multiple tiers of performance and SolidFire was a cost-effective solution.
• iWeb (Montreal, CA): iWeb was recently acquired by Internap and is already a SolidFire customer, but the company has launched an additional self-service cloud offering supplementing it’s OpenStack-based iWeb  managed cloud platform.

“Enterprise use of public, private and hybrid cloud resources are fast becoming one of the hallmarks of the next generation data center,” said SolidFire CEO, Dave Wright. “Our hosting provider customers continue to see an increase in enterprises that are opting away from deploying and managing small on premise flash arrays in exchange for better economics and guaranteed performance in public clouds Fueled by SolidFire.”

SolidFire announced its SSD hit a price point where it was cheaper than disk last July, when it raised an additional $31 million. That was somewhat of a turning point for the company, as many cloud providers were beginning to seriously look at SSD for premium cloud offerings with better performance and IOPs control.

“The explosive growth in all-flash storage arrays speaks to the demand for storage performance at the right price,” said Philbert Shih, Founder and Managing Director at Structure Research. “As flash media decreases in price, and performance becomes increasingly crucial, end users will start to look to their hosting service providers to offer all flash options. The right balance between cost, performance and capabilities is going to be a critical point of differentiation for hoster and service provider-operated clouds.”