David Cahill, Director of Strategic Alliances for Solidfire made an appearance on theCube at EMCWorld 2012.  Solidfire is a revolutionary player in the cloud architecture realm.  As the only all-flash array product that is focused exclusively to the cloud service provider market, the Boulder, Colorado based company is on a trajectory to full general availability to that market and beyond.   Dave Cahill’s interview video on theCube can be seen on SiliconAngle.tv (full clip below).

It is interestingly noted that EMC’s recent 430 million dollar acquisition of Xtrem I/O, serves as a validation of Solidfire’s technology and provides great reference to integration of scalability that is going on in the market.  The push for next-gen solutions in EMC’s portfolio indicates that rather than throwing high IOPS devices around, the focus is coming around to architecting for scale.  With this new set of design constraints in relation to scale in hand, it was clear EMC saw that retrofitting existing architecture would be insufficient.  What EMC now has the option to integrate and offer is a portfolio of solutions such as VFCache, the upcoming Thunder project flash appliance, Xtrem I/O, and the legacy suite.  With segmentation and focus on solutions it is a powerful amalgam of offerings unlike any other.

Cahill states that we are at the beginning of this innovation, and flash is a commodity component of this architecture.   That is not to say it is not without precautions, because as Cahill state, without the ability to scale, the ability to provide efficiencies, the ability to integrate performance control, or the ability to provide automation, the drive behind the economics required to take this technology beyond the 2 to 3 percent of the market that demands it today is just not there.   Those high demand clients that have super high IOPS requirements will always be there, but taking it beyond to a wider base requires cracking the code of economics in efficiency, automation, performance controls, and so forth and that requires great software.

Solidfire’s  existing track is in the early access market where cloud service providers are engaged at this phase.  As Solidfire’s products integrate into these provider offerings, it enables the transformation of IT as for this segment that is a cornerstone of their business.  Their next-gen performance provides the ideal platform to implement new features to differentiate themselves from the pack in any number of ways.  In these unique environments, IT is a profit center, not a cost and that classification is a facet of cloud services, where it is survival of the fittest in any case.  Quality of services, cost of services, breadth of services – each if not differentiated from competitors features could mean a cloud service provider is out of business.  So with that mandate, the focus is on delivering services to end customers, and not just turning knobs to an end user base, which is what traditional IT is all about.

Solidfire’s trajectory to the market continues in development and preparation for general availability at the end of the year.  Their upwards charge to the market encompasses integrating services and corresponding features as the cloud services market goes beyond just hosting data, but reaches out into breadth of services, hosting applications, and always keeping up with comparison relative to leaders such as Amazon.  In order for that to happen, a change in mindset is taking place, and that change includes new architectures and concepts.