All-flash storage system vendor SolidFire has announced the opening of an Asia-Pacific office in Singapore and the expansion of its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) team. The new and expanded offices will support its growing number of international customers, both companies building private clouds and public cloud service providers. Over the last year SolidFire reports sustained growth, including strategic partnerships with VMware, OpenStack and Citrix.

That growth is fueled mainly by a new style of computing, IT-as-a-service, says SolidFire VP of Marketing Jay Prassl. “When you want to run a new application, the time to procure the hardware, software, and stand it up can take weeks. With the advent of large-scale public providers you started seeing individuals go outside their company firewalls because they could get those resources in a few minutes from Amazon, [IBM] SoftLayer and other cloud providers.”

Internal corporate IT saw the advantage and started creating internal private clouds to provide their users with the same flexibility, basically bringing public cloud functionality inside company firewalls.

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SolidFire has become the storage vendor of choice for many of these because it has developed a system that can support thousands of applications in a shared infrastructure, while guaranteeing quality-of-service for each individual application. It can support multiple service levels in one array on an application-by-application basis with software-defined storage. Users can change the service level on any application with a few mouse clicks on the central datacenter control interface and automate response to demand changes.

Today SolidFire makes 70 percent of its gross from sales to online mega-datacenters including IaaS vendors, and 30 percent from private corporations. It expects to grow its corporate market to 50 percent of its sales by year’s end Pressl says.

Graphics courtesy SolidFire