SolidFire, a Boulder, Colo.-based maker of all-flash storage systems, today took the wraps off a batch of new functionality and enhancements that the company is preparing for a second quarter (Q2 2014) release.
The updates come on the heels of brisk adoption of the company’s storage arrays by large-scale cloud computing companies, according to SolidFire. The company eschews traditional hard drives and packs its systems with solid-state drives (SSD), enabling them to deliver blistering application performance.
SolidFire’s SF9010, which was launched last year, can deliver up to 7.5 million IOPS and scale up to 3.4 petabytes (PB) of all-flash storage with 100 nodes. Also last year, CloudSigma, a Swiss cloud services provider, announced that it was switching its public cloud storage infrastructure over to SolidFire’s flash arrays.
The latest round of updates carries on in the company’s tradition of expanding on the platform’s storage management capabilities with each new release of its Element OS software. This time, the company is giving data protection a boost.
Dubbed Carbon, Element OS v.6 now includes real-time replication support for disaster recovery without additional hardware or software. Under the SolidFire implementation, clusters can be paired with up to four other clusters in a setup that allows data to flow in both directions, enabling failover and failback operations.
Also in the data protection column is integrated backup and restore. The snapshot-based feature is compatible with the S3 and SWIFT APIs, allowing for native backup and restore of object storage.
New mixed-node cluster support allows organizations to introduce storage nodes of differing protocols and of varying capacity and performance characteristics. Built-in intelligence allocates new storage resources, making them immediately available to new and existing applications. As a bonus, boasted the company in a statement, “Mixed-Node Cluster Support allows enterprise customers to continually leverage the economics of the most current flash technology in the market while providing long term investment protection.”
Finally, SolidFire is making a bigger push into the enterprise SAN market by announcing 16Gb Fibre Channel (FC) support for its arrays, the SF3010, SF6010, and SF9010. (Currently, they feature 10Gb iSCSI connections.) The company joins EMC XtremIO, Dell Compellent, NetApp and Pure Storage in offering all-flash arrays that plug into FC-based storage networks.
“Our customers expect great performance from us, but they also expect us to support their broader business objectives to deliver internal storage services that are more agile, scalable, automated, and predictable than ever before,” said SolidFire’s founder and CEO, Dave Wright, in a statement.