One of the biggest enterprise cloud providers in all of Europe Colt Technology Services made the announcement today that SolidFire, the SSD storage provider out of Boulder, CO, will be their primary storage provider going forward.   The multinational Colt Technology Services operates a range of services including cloud amongst 20 data centers.  The move affirms SolidFire’s proposition to cloud computing, featuring quality of service, cost advantages and performance.  SolidFire beat out a number of major storage vendors in getting to this, and the proof-of-concept requirements set up by Colt were solidly demanding.

SolidFire’s Scale-Out, all SSD storage system was selected by Colt for a number of reasons.  Being a service organization, much of the focus for Colt was to heed the needs of its customers.  It starts with some of SolidFire’s specific functionality, in that the product has a performance guarantee, and gave Colt the ability to dynamically move workloads between storage tiers easily.  The fact that SolidFire is focused on the service provider market and present competitive costs were additional factors.  Colt also looked to SolidFire as a disruptive challenger in the storage market, and this alignment of culture fit into the services they are working to provide.

“Colt’s new high performance, shared storage service allows us to meet growing customer demand for performance guarantees that are not available anywhere else in the industry,” said Jon Bennett, VP Portfolio & Strategy, Colt Technology Services. “Guaranteed performance coupled with 24×7 service level availability make Colt’s new shared storage services the enterprise grade that our customers expect.  We now make it possible for our customers to deploy a far greater number of business critical applications utilizing the most predictable and efficient enterprise class cloud across Europe.”

The European cloud market has some familiar requirements, revenue and business transformation factor heavily and they often need to get new products to market quickly and efficiently.  Colt looks to providing competitive pricing by leveraging every bit of advantage they can.  With SolidFire, they are working to deliver matching compute/network/storage that is directly related to actual customer workloads, adding a dimension of efficiency that benefits the customer.  With SolidFire’s performance guarantee platform, and a flexible API, Colt is integrating the advantages into their service and delivering performance SLA’s for their clients.

SolidFire has been proving their service value again throughout the market.   In a recent briefing, we discussed how this is helping enterprises deploy more performance-sensitive and business-critical applications from the cloud at a greatly reduced cost.  SolidFire has been working for some time with ViaWest of Denver to deliver these advantages in a multi-regional cloud environment.    One of the most significant issues they have helped solve with their quality of service features is the “noisy neighbor” effect where in a shared multi-tenant environment, the performance demands of one client affects the performance of one or more clients in the same infrastructure.