Benefits

Deliver the full promise of cloud computing

The increased proliferation of cloud computing workloads is placing enormous pressures on cloud service providers. With more enterprise applications moving to the cloud, providers no longer have the right tools to cost-effectively deliver consistent performance at cloud scale. Traditional storage solutions are a major bottleneck in this equation with enterprise arrays that quite frankly, were never intended for this task.

SolidFire was specifically designed to address the storage challenges encountered at cloud-scale. Combining our all solid-state drive (SSD) storage architecture together with the innovative Element Operating System(TM) achieves higher performance, greater system efficiency, and drastically simplified management. The resulting platform is exactly what cloud providers need to stand up a differentiated and profitable high performance cloud storage service.

No other storage technology in the world has SolidFire's capability to combine revolutionary performance management, in-line efficiencies, and full system automation.

Solid-state efficiency in the cloud

In primary block storage environments traditional disk-based systems are inherently inefficient from both a performance and capacity standpoint. To meet performance demands using traditional approaches, cloud providers must balloon the number of disks deployed to increase IOPS at the expense of utilization. Some companies have attempted to overcome this capacity sprawl, or increase utilization rates by adding efficiencies like compression or deduplication. In practice however, within a primary storage environment these technologies cripple storage performance rendering the available capacity useless.

In contrast, the SolidFire storage solution is built on a high-performance SSD architecture with real-time deduplication, compression and thin provisioning inherent to the system. For the cloud service provider, this unique combination of performance and capacity optimizations yields a far more economical and efficient delivery of mission critical applications than previously possible.

Other Resources:

-Howard Marks - Data Deduplication And SSDs:

API Management and Reporting

At cloud-scale services providers cannot afford to waste valuable human resources manually configuring, tuning and provisioning an excessive amount of underutilized storage resources. Magnifying the problem further, the proprietary storage interfaces of these legacy systems demand human intervention. This model for storage management simply does not scale.

In stark contrast, the SolidFire management framework is 100% focused on automation, meaning that efficiency improves with scale, and not the other way around. Our REST-based APIs are designed for deployment in a multi-tenant environment, allowing a service provider to completely automate all tasks associated with deployment, provisioning, monitoring and reporting within a SolidFire cluster. This API-based approach also makes it very easy to integrate with homegrown cloud management suites or commercial offerings such as OpenStack, VMware vCloud Director or Citrix's CloudStack