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Cloud Builder Virtualization Specialization drives partner profitability and enables customers to benefit from economies of scale and greater efficiencies of the next-generation data center

BARCELONA, Spain and LONDON, October 13, 2015 VMworld 2015 Europe Booth #G210 - SolidFire, the #1 Solid-State Array, today announced the Virtualization Specialization tier of its Cloud Builder Partner Program for EMEA-based partners. By recognizing partners’ strategic expertise and capabilities within the most complex virtualized, VMware and cloud environments and enabling them to provide premier solutions for customers’ transition to the Next Generation Data Center, SolidFire expands its worldwide network of select, highly specialized partners. Cloud Builder Specialization partners are the only SolidFire partners who can create complex solutions that meet clients’ specific business needs at every phase of the SolidFire solution lifecycle.

Cloud computing has set a new standard for the agility, scale, automation and operational efficiency of IT infrastructure and the expectations of IT service, delivery and consumption. Virtualized cloud environments demand complex storage architectures purpose-built to guarantee performance to thousands of workloads, operating systems and applications from a single, shared infrastructure. Partners qualified as SolidFire Cloud Builder Virtualization Specialists are experts in building modern, virtualized data centers that can consolidate multiple workloads, scale-out to add capacity and performance as business needs dictate, and automate storage provisioning, management, monitoring and reporting.

Cloud Builder Virtualization Specialization partners have the highest level of expertise, technical and services capabilities in advanced technology areas and architectures. They demonstrate the most knowledge and experience with an equally high level of investment in people, processes and data center tools to service very complex environments. To achieve this specialization, partners must meet stringent requirements and maintain a client success track record.

SolidFire’s storage platform and its new Virtualization Specialization complements VMware’s virtualization technology, giving organizations the ability to significantly improve storage resource utilization and flexibility, increase application uptime and simplify day-to-day operations. Unlike legacy storage vendors, SolidFire’s Quality of Service (QoS) enables its partners to deliver their clients predictable storage performance to each individual virtual machine, while enabling applications and end user experiences to be more predictable and easier to manage. Cloud Builder Virtualization Specialists leverage SolidFire’s all-flash scale-out architecture to build Next Generation Data Centers which:

• Virtualize storage into performance and capacity resource pools that can be allocated using policies, reducing the need to over-provision and allowing more VM deployment
• Utilize a complete REST-based API, enabling automated orchestration that dynamically adjusts volume IOPS allocation and matches each virtual machine’s storage I/O requirement
• Deploy per-volume, end-to-end QoS to ensure predictable VM performance, reduce “noisy neighbors” and allow for the consolidation of multiple performance-sensitive applications onto a shared infrastructure
• Provision, change, scale and guarantee storage performance on-demand without interruption or downtime
• Designate, manage and deliver predictable virtual machine performance from the host all the way through to the underlying SolidFire storage system

“Since the launch of SolidFire’s Cloud Builder partner program in EMEA, we’ve seen tremendous growth of high-quality partners that share our DNA and have established expertise within the domains of data center infrastructure, virtualization technology and cloud applications and services,” said Ian Cooper, sales director, EMEA partners, at SolidFire. “The new Virtualization Specialization offers SolidFire customers an instant network of virtual systems experts who can efficiently and effectively design and deploy custom solutions that deliver impact at the technology level, but also drive real business value.”

The Cloud Builder Program is a foundational element of SolidFire’s go-to-market strategy, enabling the partner community to profitably engage with the SolidFire customer base in consistent and complementary ways. Launched in 2013, the Cloud Builder EMEA community has grown to nearly 50 high-quality solution providers and value-added resellers, including Alyseo, Apalia, Azuba, DTS Systeme and ShapeBlue. More than 80 percent of SolidFire’s overall business in EMEA has involved a Cloud Builder partner. Through the program and SolidFire’s unique storage consumption models, partners benefit from high and predictable margins and rebates, recurring revenue and additional income from infrastructure and integration services, thought leadership and customer retention.