SolidFire Raises $31 Million, Says Its SSD is Now Cheaper Than Disk

SolidFire is on, er, fire this month. It had a major customer win with Colt and now it tops the month off announcing that it has raised an additional $31 million in funding. The company also unveiled the SF9010 a huge, fast, all-SSD storage platform that the company says is the largest and fastest in the market today.

Oh, and the SSD solution costs less than disk, according to the company.

The company closed a Series C financing round led by Samsung Ventures, with all previous investors NEA, Valhalla Partners, and Novak Biddle Ventures Partners, participating. The $31 million in funding brings total funding to $68 million. The company will use the money on an expansion of sales and marketing to support growing enterprise and service provider demand.

“We feel that SolidFire is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the rapid growth in both public and private cloud computing markets,”  said Jay Chong, Senior Director at Samsung Ventures. “They have demonstrated clear technological leadership with their patent pending QoS capabilities, and true scale-out architecture.  And their strong customer traction puts them in the right position as the cloud computing market matures.”

9010 – SSD Cheaper Than Disk?

The company says that all-SSD now storage has crossed a major threshold, and now has a lower cost than disk. The SF9010 has less than $3/GB effective capacity, and less than $1/IOP. SF9010 is a beast; it leverages the most current market drive capacity. A single node has 9.6TB raw capacity and 34TB effective capacity, 75,000 IOPS. A full cluster of 100 nodes has 960TB raw capacity with 3.4PB of effective capacity, with 7,500,000 IOPS. This means the SF9010 has greater capacity than traditional systems. EMC VMAX 40k has 3.2PB with 3TB drives in RAID 6. HP 3PAR StoreServe has 1.6PB capacity with 2TB drives in RAID 6.

“The SF9010 really highlights SolidFire’s storage architecture in action,” said SolidFire Founder and CEO, Dave Wright. “The system is incredibly flexible and is designed to consume the latest flash technology available.  This enables us, and our customers, to keep pace with the rapid advances in the flash market and take advantage of falling cost and rising density. The SF9010 takes us across the threshold of flash becoming lower than the cost of performance disk.”

Along with the SF9010, SolidFire also released SolidFire Element OS Version 5, which adds VMware VAAI and VASA support, full encryption-at-rest without performance impact, and more detailed per-volume and per-tenant performance reporting.