SolidFire: Pioneers in the All-Flash Array StorageMarket

It takes more than just resources and workforce to build a successful organization. Strong leadership and vision are just as crucial, especially on a global stage. Dave Wright, founder of SolidFire, a leading provider of all-flash storage systems, is a testament to this philosophy. After the second company Dave founded was acquired by Rackspace, he worked closely with its Cloud division to build a cloud platform supporting tens of thousands of customers. During this work, he identified significant limitations with the storage products available on the market. Before SolidFire, storage platforms that were sold to cloud companies were rarely designed for those environments, instead they consisted of traditional enterprise products that weren’t easily customized. To address this problem, Dave came up with a solution that was specifically designed to meet the requirements and challenges associated with the cloud. That idea is the foundation upon which SolidFire was built.

SolidFire is a Colorado-based company that has expanded its presence in the Asia-Pacific market in the last two years. The organization was acquired by NetApp in early 2016 and now operates as an independent business unit.“Combining NetApp’s existing flash solutions with SolidFire’s next-generation architecture positions us as the only comprehensive all-flash portfolio in the industry,” says Kris Day, Managing Director, SolidFire APJ.

SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out platform was purpose-built for web scale IT infrastructure, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), allowing it to offer a number of advantages over traditional storage systems.

SolidFire’s all-flash array demonstrates scale-out capability, enabling users to expand storage clusters through the addition of nodes, each instantly expanding the capacity and performance of the system without downtime or the need to migrate data. It utilizes industry-standard x86 servers, simplifying the buying/selling and installation processes. As part of its ElementX program, SolidFire also supports Cisco’s UCS C-Series Rack Mount Server as a pre-validated hardware platform for SolidFire’s Element Operating System (OS).

SolidFire’s scalable all-flash storage system features a self-healing architecture and high-availability data protection for cluster-wide, RAID-less data assurance. With unique volume-level Quality of Service controls, SolidFire enables its customers to achieve guaranteed, predictable storage performance and set min, max and burst performance levels.

One of the major issues with the cloud is optimization and orchestration; however, SolidFire’s all-flash array provides a robust REST-based API, capable of automating every aspect of storage provisioning, management and reporting. SolidFire storage management capabilities have been integrated with popular systems such as OpenStack, CloudStack, Docker and VMware, enabling native performance management.

Initially, SolidFire’s core objective was to build a solution to address the issues of performance and scalability in the cloud environment. However, its all-flash solution has proven to be more than that, offering not only speed, but predictable performance as well. Today, SolidFire has a significant customer base spanning cloud providers and large enterprises, both in the Western Hemisphere and the APAC region. The company has already expanded its reach to countries such as India, Singapore, Korea, Japan and greater China. Given Dave’s industry experience and leadership capabilities, and now as part of NetApp, SolidFire looks to continue strengthening its product portfolio and its presence in the APAC region.