Aside from it’s comparable all-Flash price of around $4/GB, Solidfire brings a unique feature to the cloud storage providers; separation of data performance by co-located customers.
Its answer is providing an all solid state solution that provides fine grain QoS control for writing firm performance SLAs, increasing VM density (up to 216 virtual machines per rack unit), and the ability to eliminate noisy neighbors. It offers in-line data reduction and up to 85 percent utilization, so a provider can use more of the system than before.
“This is a fully automated storage environment with REST-based API for complete control,” said Prassl. ”You can extend the performance knob to a customer. And you’re able to deliver that technology below the $1 per IOP range, below the $4 GB range.”
“This is a huge opportunity for the cloud service providers who only host about 10% of the compute that is possible today,” Prassl continues. “On the left hand side, you see test/dev/backup/archive – which all have low performance sensitivity. But what about apps like Oracle and SAP? SolidFire allows them to bring a high performance app to the cloud.”
Noisy Neighbors
The company says Solidfire gets rid of noisy neighbor problems when customers on shared resources start stepping on top of one another.
In terms of competition, the company sees EMC as its biggest rival, but also insists that it offers more scalability than SSD players like Nimble and Violin.” SolidFire can achieve a much larger pool of iops and capacity than others,” says Prassl.
