So what does enterprise IT need to confidently run more production applications in a cloud environment? Rodney Rogers (@rjrogers87) Chairman & CEO of Virtustream recently blogged on the six key attributes required to run SAP in the cloud. Rodney's first attribute nails the key storage challenge that must be overcome:

Application-level SLAs without giving up the economics of multi-tenant: If you deploy an architecture that can control my compute and storage IOPS within your multi-tenant stack, you can give me application-level latency guarantees. With this I can then trust production instances of SAP, and thus my revenue generating systems, on your cloud.

               - The Enterprise: I'm Not Sexy and I Know It, TechCrunch 10/06/12

Advancing the cloud as a viable medium for more than bursty, performance insensitive applications is part evolution and part revolution. The evolution side requires an enterprise to become increasingly comfortable with hosting their business critical applications in the the cloud. But this evolution is stuck in neutral without revolutionary new technology that bridges the gap between today's cloud and the infrastructure required to bring all applications into the cloud.  For the cloud to evolve, enterprises need a greater degree of confidence that production applications will have access to predictable and consistent performance. Up till now that level of confidence and performance guarantee hasn't existed. But that is all about to change.

Starting on 11.13.12 cloud providers world-wide will have access to storage technology from SolidFire that will completely transform customers expectations for what is possible in a cloud infrastructure. SolidFire's all-SSD storage platform delivers the unique combination of performance, control and VM density required for service providers to confidently and profitably host their customers most performance sensitive workloads.

On 11.13.12 service providers will have a choice.  Continue to struggle with differentiation in a hyper-competitive market, or innovate their way to higher profits by delivering guaranteed performance to business critical applications. SolidFire's ability to combine the best of dedicated all-SSD performance with true multi-tenant economics is nothing short of revolutionary.  And yes, we can help you do it all below the cost of HDD systems.

The high-performance (r)evolution is fast approaching, and we want you to join us!  Evolving your cloud to accommodate high-performance applications is easier than you think.  Stay tuned and our team will show how...

-Dave Wright, Founder & CEO