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Delivers Industry’s Only Cloud-scale All-Flash Storage Platforms to Japanese Enterprises and Service Providers

BOULDER, Colo. and TOKYO, March 19, 2015 - SolidFire (HQ: Boulder, Colorado, U.S.; CEO and Founder: Dave Wright), the leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center, furthered its expansion into the Asian market today with the announcement that it has opened a new office in Tokyo, Japan, headed by IT industry veteran Yoshikazu Okada. In addition, the company announced a new distribution agreement in Japan with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (HQ: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan; President and CEO: Satoshi Kikuchi).

These two announcements follow SolidFire’s recent expansion in Australia, establishment of the company’s regional headquarters in Singapore, and completion of a distribution agreement with Nissho Electronics Corporation, highlighting SolidFire's rapid growth across Asia Pacific and strong demand from Japanese enterprises for adaptable, flash-based storage solutions that meet today's IT performance demands.

The company is seeing an increasing number of Japanese corporations adopting all-flash infrastructures to fuel their OpenStack and VMware-based cloud infrastructures. SolidFire’s agreement with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions means that more Japanese enterprises will have access to SolidFire’s award winning scale-out flash architecture.

“These announcements mark our full-scale debut in Japan's dynamic IT market,” commented SolidFire Founder and CEO, Dave Wright. “Large enterprises and top service providers in Japan are demanding levels of performance and workload consolidation that only SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out storage platform can deliver. I am happy to welcome Yoshikazu Okada, a proven IT professional, to lead our local operations and to welcome ITOCHU Techno-Solutions into our regional network of distribution partners.”

Japan country manager Yoshikazu Okada added, “Japanese enterprises with data and services in the Cloud can now leverage scale-out all flash storage to raise the efficiency and expandability of their data centers without making major new hardware investments. With its industry-leading flash array solutions, SolidFire is in a prime position to help these domestic companies meet and surpass their performance goals in the Cloud. I look forward to helping make this a reality for more and more Japanese customers.”

General Manager of Telecommunication Systems Planning Division, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, Shun Ando, commented, "We welcome the launch of SolidFire in Japan. The IT infrastructure market is rapidly evolving with migration of innovative functionalities in the cloud through vertical and horizontal integration. Modern enterprises require multi-tenancy, eco-partner integration, solutions for optimization and automation, high scale-out capability and robust platforms for non-stop services. We will work with SolidFire, the dominant player in cloud storage, to enable high-grade cloud solutions with the strongest technical expertise for Japanese customers."

SolidFire has proven its technology in the world’s most demanding data centers and continues to raise the bar for its peers in the all-flash market with a series of recent announcements made at its Second Annual Analyst Day. The announcements include:

• Launch of SolidFire’s Element X Program, which enables hyper-scale enterprise and service provider customers to combine the software of SolidFire’s award-winning storage platform with their own hardware - a development aligning SolidFire, more than any other storage company, directly with the needs of hyper-scale customers.
• Expansion of the SF Series product line with the introduction of the SF9605, which delivers 34.5TB effective capacity and 50,000 predictable IOPS at the lowest $/GB cost within the portfolio.
• SolidFire’s new FlashForward Program delivers Platform Compatibility and Unlimited Drive Wear Guarantees designed to assure customers that their flash investments will continue to scale and remain current as new flash geometries, performance and price points enter the market.
• Closing out 2014 with an average 50 percent increase in sequential quarterly bookings, while SolidFire’s Enterprise customer bookings grew 570 percent over the previous year.

Only SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center - and beyond. Discover the elements of the SolidFire platform. SolidFire systems leverage a scale-out storage architecture that enables customers to achieve linear scale of both capacity and performance without downtime or performance impact. Schedule a SolidFire demo today or visit www.solidfire.com for more information.