In their second interview on day two of the OpenStack Summit 2014, theCUBE co-hosts Dave Furrier and Stu Miniman, with SolidFire CEO Dave Wright discussed overall shifts in cloud infrastructure, challenges and highlights of OpenStack, and how SolidFire is blossoming in the market.

Wright answered Furrier’s first question, a request for an update on what he had presented at the keynote, by addressing how OpenStack has “emerged as an operating system for the next generation datacenter.” He described how IT is moving away from the silo infrastructure, and people are looking for ways to “break down the silos and move to scale-out databases.”

Next, Miniman asked Wright to talk about active infrastructure and comment on how converged architecture and OpenStack mesh together. Wright responded that, although Openstack has gotten simpler, “what’s really missing is something that puts all pieces together.”

Miniman bounced off Wright’s reply, mentioning that SolidFire offers the first product to helps mediate the complication. Wright agreed, mentioning that he believes the strength of his product is its “community-based, multi-vendor” approach that provides “the best from the community.”

Miniman wondered about SolidFire from a hardware standpoint, asking Wright to comment on his company’s relationship with Dell and Red Hat. Wright mentioned that Dell has been a longtime leader dedicated to OpenStack. He stated that Red Hat became “the distribution of choice” because of its position in the open source community. The alliance between these two companies, Wright mentioned, made them a “natural union for our first agile infrastructure.”

Furrier asked Wright about their usage structures, and whether SolidFire is more IOPS focused with solid state drive (SSD). Furrier also inquired whether “that is their primary use-case or whether [they’re] doing Big Data in SSD as well.”

Wright responded that they have a mix of workloads, which he considers a strength of their storage environment. One of the promises of SolidFire, he highlighted, is that it’s a “platform with a tremendous amount of performance, but very cost effective.”

Wright detailed that SolidFire’s relationship with OpenStack has been ongoing for two years — he believes in their “vendor-neutral, community-based, open-sourced approach.”

When asked for an OpenStack update from his own perspective, Wright mentioned he believes OpenStack has “reached a level of maturity that a lot of commercial software never gets to.” He described Openstack as “production ready” and cited customers running OpenStack “at large scale, in production.”

Wright also underscored that OpenStack has grown tremendously in breadth “far beyond basic compute and storage to platform technologies.” He was sure to acknowledge, though, that while it’s “easier than ever to get started,” there’s also a “very rich ecosystem of products to consider.” His own agile infrastructure offers a “simple, clean, standards-based approach to OpenStack” that people can build on to incorporate their own preferences.

Miniman also asked Wright to comment on SolidFire’s involvement in the creation of Cinder: “Who’s helping build that? Where is the innovation coming from?”

Wright explained that early on, Solid fire realized that block storage was important. They helped work on the breakout of Cinder from Nova. Now, Wright describes Cinder as a “robust storage management platform” that is “vendor-neutral,” and to which many vendors and customers contribute.

Next, Wright responded to a request for an update on SolidFire. He responded that his company experienced “700 percent growth.” Despite this advance, Wright stressed that SolidFire has a very pragmatic approach; they’re not just out to solve “performance problems” but to take on “bigger problems around agility, efficiency, and scaling infrastructures.”

To conclude, Furrier asked Wright to consider, “what’s so important about this year” for OpenStack. Wright expressed that he believes the “breakaway velocity” with which Openstack has been embraced means that it’s “going to be part of the industry for a long time to come.” He also mentioned that OpenStack is one of the most talked about technologies “for a good reason.”