"Public cloud services are simultaneously cannibalizing and stimulating demand for external IT services spending, according to Gartner, Inc. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) adoption - the most basic and fundamental form of cloud computing service - has expanded beyond development and test use cases."

- Gartner Group, Press Release, 11/01/12

Just last week I was at the Next Generation Storage Symposium delivering a presentation about the undeniable shifts in the computing landscape that are transforming IT as we know it. The combined forces of mobile and cloud are rapidly becoming the solution for an increasing percentage of IT needs.

From a cloud perspective we are still in the early days, but market data confirms the inevitable move to public and private cloud infrastructures. On the supply side of the equation, pure-play cloud providers and managed hosters are responding. The 451 Group recently released a report on the IaaS market predicting 49% annual growth through the year 2015.

On the demand side, Gartner recently released a survey of almost 600 organizations globally regarding customers use of the cloud for production applications.

"A recent Gartner survey found that 19 percent of organizations are using cloud computing for most of production computing, and 20 percent of organizations are using storage as a service for all, or most, storage requirements."

19% penetration for production applications in the cloud is a great start, but it means there is another 81% to go. How long is it going to take to get there? To continually expand the spectrum of applications that can be hosted in a cloud environment requires game changing innovations at all layers of the cloud infrastructure. Until now storage has been a real laggard. Constrained to the options available from existing storage vendors, this advancement of cloud computing could take decades.

We are not willing to wait that long. With the announcement today of general availability for SolidFire's all-SSD cloud-scale storage system, cloud providers can break free from those legacy storage systems. Purpose-built to guarantee performance to thousands of applications simultaneously, SolidFire has set the bar for what a high-performance storage system built for cloud computing should look like. Our early customers, including ViaWest, Databarracks, Calligo and CloudSigma seem to agree. Each is using the SolidFire platform as a springboard to drive more and more production applications to the cloud.

The (r)evolution is here, and it's growing by the day. If you're building a large public or private cloud, come talk to SolidFire about how we're advancing the way the world uses the cloud.

-Dave Wright, Founder & CEO