SolidFire is going big when it comes to flash-based enterprise storage systems. The Boulder, Colo.-based provider of all-SSD (solid-state drive) data storage arrays today took the wraps off the new SF9010, a system that scales up to a whopping 3.4 petabytes (PB) with 100 nodes.
Apart from claiming the all-SSD storage capacity crown, the company also boasts that at up to 7.5 million IOPS, the SF9010 also wins in the performance category. Additionally, the SolidFire claims that the system also marks a turning point for the economics of SSD-based arrays.
SolidFire CEO Dave Wright offered some comparisons on his company’s offerings versus the industry at large. “A base cluster configuration of 5-nodes provides over 173TB of effective capacity, larger than most all-flash storage systems on the market,” he wrote in a blog post.
Storage giants make big targets when gunning for the makers of traditional disk-based systems. “A modest 30 node cluster offers over 1PB of capacity, while a fully-scaled 100 node system tops out at over 3.4PB of effective capacity – more than an EMC VMAX 40K filled with 3TB spinning disks,” added Wright.
According to SolidFire, organizations that deploy the SF9010 in capacities of 60 terabytes (TB) to 3.4 PB can achieve cost savings that dip below traditional disk-based infrastructures — below $3 per GB.
“That’s not only significantly below every other flash based system on the market today, it’s less than most performance disk and hybrid systems as well,” blogged Wright.
The company’s cost-containment strategy made waves in April when CloudSigma, a cloud storage services company, announced that it was transitioning to an all-flash infrastructure based on SolidFire storage. CloudSigma pledged to keep prices in line those of the outgoing disk-based service ($0.14 per GB per month).
The new hardware is joined by a new update to the company’s storage software platform, SolidFire Element OS Version 5. New features include support for VMware’s VAAI and VASA APIs and improved per-volume and per-tenant performance reporting. Data security gets a boost in the form of encryption-at-rest support minus the performance hit.
SolidFire SF9010 goes on sale on September 1, 2013.
Along with the SF9010, SolidFire announced that it had raised an additional $31 million in funding. Samsung Ventures, the venture capital arm of SolidFire’s SSD supplier — the SF9010 is outfitted with 960 GB enterprise-grade MLC SSDs from Samsung — led the Series C round. NEA, Valhalla Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners also participated in the round.
In company remarks, Samsung Ventures senior director Jay Chong hinted at his company’s ambitions for the growing cloud storage infrastructure market.
“We feel that SolidFire has very strong leadership of All-SSD Storage Platform in both public and private cloud computing markets. Their patent pending QoS capabilities and true scale-out architecture will put them in the right position as the cloud computing market matures,” stated Chong.
It’s not the first time Samsung has backed an all-SSD storage firm. In 2011, the Korean consumer electronics giant pumped funds into Pure Storage.