The Latest NetApp SolidFire News
Product and Solution Information, Press Releases, Announcements

Enterprise Storage Group (ESG) reports that SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out architecture is purpose-built to meet unpredictable demands of the next-generation, enterprise data center

BOULDER, Colo., May 13, 2015 – SolidFire, ranked the #1 Solid-State Array, today released findings from the Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2015 report, “Quantifying the Economic Value of a SolidFire Deployment,” which compared a SolidFire system with a traditional storage vendor’s well-documented reference architecture designed for sizing VMware deployments. For customers looking to consolidate multiple workloads, the report demonstrates a strong TCO and outlines how customers can guarantee performance, deploy far less hardware, and simplify their systems management.

“As these organizations look for high-performance, cost-effective solutions, they should strongly consider a storage solution that was specifically designed for the next-generation data center,” said ESG Lab Analyst Aviv Kaufmann. “SolidFire storage was purpose-built around the three pillars that define the next-generation data center: consolidation, automation and scale.”

ESG Lab’s cost/benefit analysis indicated that by virtualizing and automating performance, SolidFire can eliminate up to 93% of traditional storage-related problems. These problems might include issues inherent in a traditional architecture that are caused by workload imbalance, monopolization of a fixed set of resources, insufficient resources in a pool, requirements to move VMs, inefficient tiering, and controller bottlenecks. In addition, SolidFire storage platforms were shown to reduce hardware, software and support costs up to 3.8 times compared to traditional disk-based storage architectures.

The report also highlighted SolidFire’s ability to lower operating expenses by up to 67 percent by automating many of the time-consuming tasks performed by traditional storage administrators. Achieved through SolidFire’s ability to automate every aspect of storage provisioning management, monitoring and reporting, ESG Lab estimated that customers could more rapidly respond to the demands of the business by deploying VMs up to 15 times faster than traditional storage architectures.

“As many of our customer know, the SolidFire storage platform is about so much more than simply providing raw flash performance,” commented Dave Wright, Founder and CEO of SolidFire. “Our scale-out architecture, guaranteed Quality of Service, and deep automation capabilities combine to deliver remarkable efficiencies and cost savings not only for the business but for the individuals that manage the data center on a day-to-day basis. Performance issues are such a part of today’s life in the data center, that for many it is hard to quantify time and efficiency gains you get by simply eliminating this one issue. When you combine that with the benefits gained by eliminating scalability issues, future compatibility issues and difficulties around automation, the benefits to the business are staggering.”

ESG Lab’s cost/benefit analysis revealed that scaling a SolidFire deployment is extremely simple, quick and automated. Because SolidFire guarantees that nodes will always be able to be intermixed in order to add both capacity or performance, storage can be expanded granularly without worrying about controller overhead. Simply select the node that provides the right balance of capacity and performance and non-disruptively add it to any existing system.

When compared to a traditional storage architecture, ESG Lab’s analysis predicts that, with SolidFire, administrators can expect to spend up to 12 times less time dealing with the growth requirements of the storage system. ESG estimates that this could result in savings of up to 226 hours of administrative productivity over a five-year period. And, because storage resources are automatically made available to every volume in the system, ESG estimates that a SolidFire deployment can respond up to 28 times faster to the need for increased storage resources.

“SolidFire is built from the ground up for the next-generation data center. It’s architected specifically for cloud infrastructures and is the foundation of our IaaS, PaaS and SaaS platforms,” said Julian Box, CEO of Calligo. “SolidFire has enabled us to create a much more granular approach to our service offerings; this allows us to provide a truly agile-based cloud service, including performance guarantees and end-to-end encryption, to our clients at a price point that other service providers have not been able to match. SolidFire is giving us a competitive edge.”

Download ESG’s Lab Whitepaper, Quantifying the Economic Value of a SolidFire Deployment. Learn how SolidFire’s scale-out all-flash storage platforms increase IT departments’ responsiveness to the business. Read about SolidFire’s SF Series storage platforms, which start at 35TB of effective capacity and deliver guaranteed performance to every workload.