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The IDC MarketScape recognized SolidFire for Quality of Service (QoS) and offering more consumption model options attuned to 3rd Platform computing requirements than other vendors

BOULDER, Colo., January 12, 2016

SolidFire, a leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center, today announced that International Data Corporation (IDC), a premier global provider of IT market intelligence, has recognized SolidFire as a Major Player in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide All-Flash Array 2015-2016 Vendor Assessment (doc # US40721815, December 2015). As the all-flash array (AFA) market has moved away from dedicated application deployment models and more toward mixed workload consolidation, the IDC MarketScape asserts that SolidFire stands out for its QoS capabilities, scale-out architecture, ability to support multi-tenancy, and the top-end scalability of its SolidFire SF Series.

"Although there is commonality in enterprise storage management capabilities, significant differentiation exists today in QoS controls. SolidFire sets the bar by providing a complete set of controls on the array itself, as well as extensive integration with QoS controls on third-party platforms, like VMware vSphere,” said Eric Burgener, research director, Storage Systems, IDC. “As customers start to use AFAs more and more as general-purpose primary storage arrays, contention for system resources will become a real concern. As a group, service providers using AFAs tend to run them at the highest levels of utilization, and SolidFire’s strong position in QoS is due in large part to its initial focus on the service provider market, which has since expanded to more broadly target enterprise users as well.”

Further detail supporting SolidFire’s recognition as a Major Player included:

• Providing a complete set of QoS controls on the array itself, with the ability to set minimum, maximum and burst limits for IOPS, with QoS evenly balanced across all available system resources, admission control and the ability to integrate with external platforms such as VMware vSphere and OpenStack.
• Extensive support for multi-tenant environments, highlighted by its long-time QoS capabilities.
• Offering more granular performance expansion options than the other three evaluated AFA vendors using scale-out architectures.
• Allowing generational mixing and supporting an excellent technology refresh paradigm that is flexible, nondisruptive, and comes with a compatibility guarantee that technology generations will interoperate.
• Its ActiveIQ real-time, cloud-based health and monitoring service that provides historical trending at the cluster, node, account and volume level, allowing customers to better anticipate business demands, increase productivity and reduce risk.

“As a disruptive company in the storage space, we take extreme pride in setting the bar high in a number of different areas, including our QoS capabilities, scale-out architecture, support of multi-tenant environments and the overall flexibility of our all-flash storage systems. Those features are what makes us such an attractive option for customers,” said Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire. “As enterprises continue to embrace all-flash solutions, we believe that this report is a strong validation of the technology we’ve developed and our leading position in the market.”

The IDC MarketScape report evaluates seven vendors in the AFA market segment by analyzing how well aligned their existing capabilities are with current customer needs, as well as how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. IDC analysts look at both how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market, along with the high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.

For a complimentary excerpt of the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide All-Flash Array 2015-2016 Vendor Assessment, please visit SolidFire’s website. To learn more about SolidFire and its market-leading all-flash array storage systems, please visit www.solidfire.com.