SolidFire, which provides solid-state-drives (SSD) for cloud providers announced the initial partner list for its technology. SolidFire and other SSD providers are seeing a significant increase in demand for their products due to the need for high performance I/O in heavily virtualized and cloud environments.

The initial list of of vendors includes:

• Arista Networks
• Canonical
• Citrix
• OnApp
• OpenStack
• Tier 3
• VMware

The company also announced key technology alliances with Intel, Marvell and Viking Technology.

Many cloud providers are switching to SSD storage in an effort to eliminate the latency that spinning disks can cause when disk reads and writes occur. The increased use of virtualization has created storage and I/O workloads that  differ from what most companies and service providers managed previously. Solutions like caching only provide short term fixes. SolidFire, which launched in 2010, offers a software solution that runs on physical servers and provides highly scalable block storage. The company takes advantage of the fact that virtual machines (with the same operating system)  can be deduplicated down to a much smaller footprint — which means SolidFire can promise providers lower cost and better service than disk-based drives.