Flash hardware vendor SolidFire announced a new system named SF6010, the successor of the SF3010 in many regards. It packs a raw hardware capacity of 6 terabytes and ‘effective capacity’ of up to 24TBs: SolidFire’s solution comes with deduplication and compression software that allows users to be much more efficient in the way they store their data.

The SF6010 can scale to 100 nodes, and can also be used to power a single instance that packs a maximum of 2.4 petabytes in capacity, and offers performance of 5 million IOs per second.

“The SolidFire technology is designed to advance the way the world uses the cloud. The release of the SF6010 allows us to address a wider market segment and enables cloud providers to deliver guaranteed storage resources to a larger set of applications in their cloud,” said Jay Prassl, vice president of marketing at SolidFire.

SolidFire is a fairly new player in the flash storage space, considering it emerged from stealth only last year. But the young company is seeing a lot of growth, and is actively expanding into new fields in an effort to maintain this momentum.

A couple of months back the firm announced support for OpenStack, the open-source cloud imitative that is used to power the Rackspace Cloud and a number of other platforms. Flash is gaining a lot of traction, and now that the industry drawing more and more attention, SolidFire and its peers need to become more adept to the growing competition.

While the likes of Fusion-io and Violin Memory are spearheading the evolution of flash, bigger players such as EMC and Dell are also getting involved. Bob Fine, the marketing head at Compellent, disclosed at Dell Storage Forum that his company is opening up to the technology, now that real value is starting to be realized.