SolidFire Gains Traction for SSD-Powered Cloud Storage

solidfire-FiveStack

A "five stack" of SolidFire's all-SSD storage systems.

SolidFire is definitely on to something. The all-SSD storage architecture provider has been promising service providers that it can provide premium storage with quality of service guarantees in a much more cost effective manner than traditional solutions. The proof of these claims is in the continued customer traction it is seeing, most recently signing up European Telecom Colt.

Colt is a forward-thinking kind of telecom, different in an industry typically identified as cumbersome and slow to evolve. Colt has the largest enterprise-class cloud footprint in Europe, with 20 European data centers in 10 countries.

"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 24x7 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."

SolidFire will supply storage for Tiers 0-3, with Guaranteed performance added to Tiers 1 and 2. Tier 4 is SATA. The rollout of SolidFire gear across seven Colt data centers will begin with Zurich, Milan, and London.

The SolidFire rollout will occur in two phases. Phase 1 will be the 5 tiers, with all new volumes place on SolidFire infrastructure, and current application volumes migrated over as hardware depreciates. Phase II will see delivery of additional services beyond shared storage tiers, such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, PaaS, and/or SaaS – in other words, it will be a foundation for a lot of Colt’s cloud initiatives.

SolidFire has been in General Availability for three quarters and the customer list is growing. The first companies to dip their toes into Solidfire were Viawest and Calligo. It has since added several big names such as IWeb based in Montreal, Canada.

The majority of its customers out of the gate have been cloud providers, with a few enterprises as well. Most of these deployments are production data, according to Jay Prassl, VP Sales & Marketing, SolidFire. It’s enjoying a 91% win rate of deal with a proof of concept, but word is spreading; 42% of deals have been completed without POC. Cloud Service Providers are aggressively building clouds to compete with AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, and SolidFire believes it provides quantifiable differentiation and business value.

SolidFire’s Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities with multi-tenant clouds continues to be a strong selling point for providers looking to differentiate cloud storage offerings. With the application of SolidFire QoS controls, providers are able to create fine-grained tiers of performance, isolate application performance, and enforce performance SLAs. It kills off the noisy neighbor effect – the result of one noisy neighbor affecting the performance of others in a multi-tenant setup.