BOULDER, Colo. - February 27, 2013 -- SolidFire, a leader in all-solid-state (SSD) storage systems designed for the cloud, released a new infographic to illustrate the broad impact that "Noisy Neighbors" can have across a shared storage infrastructure.  The graphic outlines the performance variability caused by Noisy Neighbors as well as the impact on the number of support calls, ticket count, and engineering resources required to respond to poor application performance.

When evaluating a service provider or moving a critical workload to the cloud, enterprises have no idea what applications will be sharing the same infrastructure. With applications designed to consume as many resources as are available for a task, Noisy Neighbors can quickly consume a disproportionate amount of available Input/Output Per Second (IOPS) killing the performance of the applications around them.  Yet the problem is not limited to the applications next door, either. The "blast radius" of a Noisy Neighbor extends well beyond its immediate vicinity the way a rowdy party in one apartment will surely bother the folks next door and wake others several floors above. SolidFire's new infographic breaks down the problem by defining the blast radius of a Noisy Neighbor, and proposes a solution for improving storage Quality of Service (QoS) for cloud providers and the companies they serve.

"The performance variability caused by Noisy Neighbors is a critical issue keeping enterprise-grade applications from being deployed in the cloud," says Jason Carolan, CTO of ViaWest. "The majority of cloud providers try to get around this issue by manually overprovisioning volumes or moving volumes to dedicated hardware at a great expense to themselves and their customers. ViaWest has taken a much different approach to delivering predictable performance to enterprise applications that is far more efficient and cost effective."

According to a recent CIO survey, enterprises currently do not trust that cloud infrastructure is capable of running their business-critical and performance sensitive applications. "Performance variability and inconsistent application delivery is one of the primary hesitations around deploying mission-critical applications in a cloud infrastructure," stated Philbert Shih, managing director of Structure Research.  "It is not until providers can guarantee application performance that we will find more production applications deployed in the cloud."

"It is important to understand that delivering guaranteed quality of service in storage is not as easy as adding it as a feature.  True quality of service is an architectural concept that must be considered, and implemented, at the very core of storage product design," says CEO of SolidFire, Dave Wright. "Quality of Service (QoS) capability is essential for both cloud providers and cloud consumers.  Without QoS, achieving predictable performance within a multi-tenant cloud is virtually impossible."

About SolidFire
SolidFire delivers high-performance data storage systems for cloud service providers. Leveraging an all-flash scale-out storage architecture with patented volume-level quality-of-service (QoS) controls, providers can now guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within shared infrastructures. By using real-time data reduction techniques and system-wide automation, SolidFire is fueling new and profitable block-storage services that are advancing the way the world uses the cloud.

Learn more: www.solidfire.com | www.twitter.com/solidfire | www.facebook.com/solidfire.

Media Contact:
Aimee Eichelberger
Borders + Gratehouse for SolidFire
415.963.4174 ext. 7
solidfire@bordersgratehouse.com