UPDATED 06:50 EDT / JULY 26 2013

NEWS

SolidFire Gets Ahead in the Cloud with Cheaper-Than-Disk SSD Storage

In a move that underlines just how important high-performance storage has become for the cloud and Big Data, flash storage provider SolidFire has just secured a new round of series C funding to the tune of $31 million. At the same time, it’s also rolled out an expanded product line, offering SSD storage at a lower cost than traditional disk-based storage, something that’s sure to cause a few ripples in the market.

SolidFire highlighted its new SF9010 high performance, high density storage platform, which consists of 100 nodes and is claimed to be the “world’s largest and fastest all-SSD storage system.”

You might be thinking this news is a little dull, but in fact the SF9010 has the potential to shake up the boring old world of cloud infrastructure in a way we haven’t seen since, well, the introduction of boring old cloud infrastructure.

To understand why, we need to appreciate one of the major headaches of the storage space world. Ever been sat at your desk and noticed that your work email suddenly slows down to a snail’s pace, causing your attachments to take a horrendously long time to upload? This is known as the “noisy neighbor” problem, and comes about when one particular application in the storage space consumes too much processing power, causing all the other apps to suffer. To solve this problem, IT people generally like to shunt the most important applications into their own storage unit, so they’re isolated from the noisy neighbor.

This is an old practice, but until recently doing so has also been really expensive and inefficient. But thanks to SolidFire, that’s all changed. According to the company, SF9010 is a superior storage platform that’s capable of mitigating these problems, allowing different applications to co-exist in the same space without tripping each other up. SolidFire claims that SF9010 is both faster and more efficient than anything its competitors can offer, and looking at the spec sheet that certainly seems to be the case. Rivals like Violin might have the edge when it comes to speed, but its storage capacity is non-existent compared to SolidFire’s. Meanwhile, while NetApp and 3PAR can boast an impressive storage capacity, they just don’t fly as fast as the SF9010.

Asked about how the SF9010 compares to traditional storage arrays, Wikibon’s CTO David Floyer pointed to a range of advantages the hardware has over competitor offerings:

“It takes up a much smaller space, uses much less power, and offers much more I/O, and that’s the important thing,” stressed Floyer.

“The most important difference is the I/O, and the way their quality of service works.”

See Floyer’s full analysis right here on SiliconANGLE NewsDesk:

Where it really gets interesting though is with the pricing. SolidFire’s asking for just $3 per GB and $1 per IO, which the company claims is even cheaper than the rates traditional performance disks. It doesn’t outprice commodity hardware, but the cost is low enough that more than a few enterprises might be tempted to switch to next-generation storage.

At least Samsung seems fairly convinced anyway. The Koreann firm led the aforementioned $31 million seeding round, upping the company’s total funding to $68 million to date. According to SolidFire, these new funds will be used to tool up its sales and marketing efforts as it looks to expand all-flash storage.


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