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SolidFire SF Series receives the highest scores in five out of six use cases

BOULDER, Colo., July 01, 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 given SolidFire the highest score for the Overall Use Case in Gartner’s 2015 Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays Report 1 for the second year in a row. In addition, SolidFire received the highest scores in four of the remaining five use cases: Online Transaction Processing, Server Virtualization, High-Performance Computing and Analytics. SolidFire received the second highest score for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure use case.

Gartner’s Critical Capabilities research provides a comparative analysis by scoring competing products or services against a set of critical differentiators and offers actionable advice on which vendor products/services customers should add to their shortlists for further evaluation. In this year’s report, Gartner evaluated 11 Solid-State Arrays (SSAs) across six high-impact use cases and quantify product attractiveness against seven critical capabilities important to IT leaders. SolidFire received the highest score (3.6 of 5) for the Overall Use Case, calculated as an average of all use cases matching Gartner’s common client scenarios.

Visit SolidFire’s Analyst Reviews Page for a complimentary copy of Gartner’s Critical Capabilities research, which reports that:

• SolidFire received the highest scores for the following use cases (out of 5):

• Overall Use Case (3.60) - average of the following use cases.
• Online Transaction Processing (3.58) - closely affiliated with business-critical applications, such as database management systems (DBMSs).
• Server Virtualization (3.61) - encompasses business-critical applications, back-office and batch workloads, and development.
• High-Performance Computing (3.61) - large numbers of servers and storage arrays, which together deliver high compute densities and aggregated throughput.
• Analytics (3.66) - applies to all analytic applications that are packaged or provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities for a particular domain or business problem.

• SolidFire received the second highest scores for the following use cases (out of 5):

• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (3.56) - the practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine (VM) running on a centralized server.

According to Gartner, SSAs continue to replace high-end enterprise arrays configured for performance, and are increasingly being used for consolidation in business and mission-critical environments. The rapid pace of innovation via flash memory and in-line data reduction has eroded the cost advantages of general-purpose arrays for certain workloads, with leading customers starting to pursue a silicon-only data center strategy.

“SolidFire was founded on the premise of data center transition, and delivering IT services and infrastructure from a cloud framework. Everything from our scale-out architecture, to how we guarantee storage performance, to our ability to automate our entire system stems from this core concept,” stated Dave Wright, Founder and CEO of SolidFire. “We believe that Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays is great validation not only to the technology that we have developed, but more importantly to fundamental problems and use cases that it solves for. Customers are driving to deliver their infrastructure and applications as a service - you see it everywhere you turn. But you can’t do it successfully without the right storage foundation.”

SolidFire was also recently recognized as a ‘Visionary’ in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays.2 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. The report evaluated 13 All-Flash Array providers specifically on completeness of vision and ability to execute, positioning SolidFire furthest along the ‘Completeness of Vision’ axis in the Visionaries Quadrant.

Visit SolidFire’s Analyst Reviews Page for complimentary copies of the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays and companion Critical Capabilities research.