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

Positioned Furthest Along the “Completeness of Vision” Axis in the Visionaries Quadrant for Second Consecutive Year

BOULDER, Colo., June 29, 2015

SolidFire, the leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center, today announced that Gartner, Inc., a leading IT research and advisory firm, has recognized SolidFire as a Visionary in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays for the second consecutive year.¹ Gartner’s second Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays evaluated 13 All-Flash Array providers specifically on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

As the appetite for all-flash storage infrastructure continues to grow within the enterprise, Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays is a welcome guide for customers surveying the landscape of all-flash storage systems. The advent of cloud computing has raised end-user expectations about how IT infrastructure is delivered, and long wait times for the delivery of rigid, siloed storage infrastructure has quickly become unacceptable. Founded in 2010, SolidFire has become the standard for deploying flash at scale, enabling customers to support a broad range of dynamic workloads with greater agility, performance predictability and automation across the data center.

According to Gartner, “Solid-State Arrays provide performance levels an order of magnitude faster than disk-based storage arrays at competitive prices per GB, enabled by in-line data reduction and lower-cost flash memory.” Gartner reports that “demand for Solid-State Arrays continues to exceed market expectations.” High adoption rates are due not only to the hard requirements, such as increases in productivity, reduced environmental footprint and storage efficiency, but also to the desire for a new storage technology and its order-of-magnitude improvement in performance. The advent of these factors has led to the continuing high rate of adoption of SSAs, evidenced by the fact that the SSA market segment more than doubled in 2014 compared to 2013, with the total market revenue for SSAs in 2014 totaling $1.43 billion.¹

“Storage is the most transformative element of the data center today. Our customers are demanding storage solutions that match their next generation data center vision as they move from a virtualized infrastructure to one driven by greater automation and orchestration,” commented SolidFire’s Founder and CEO Dave Wright. “Delivering cloud infrastructure at scale poses a unique set of challenges in terms of performance predictability, system expansion and redundancy. We set out to solve the hard problems first, and with that have become the premier storage infrastructure in large public and private cloud infrastructures around the world. We believe naming SolidFire as a Visionary in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays validates that we continue to meet enterprise performance demands while delivering ease of scale, automation and guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) - enabling our customers to take their infrastructure where it’s never been before.”

According to Gartner, “A vendor in the Visionaries quadrant delivers innovative products that address operationally or financially important end-user problems at a broad scale, but has not demonstrated the ability to capture market share or sustainable profitability. Visionary vendors are frequently privately held companies and acquisition targets for larger, established companies. The likelihood of acquisition often reduces the risks associated with installing their systems.”

¹ Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, Valdis Filks, Joseph Unsworth, Arun Chandasekaran, 23 June 2015